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THREE STUDIES IN 
LITERATURE 



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THREE STUDIES IN 
LITERATURE 



BY 

LEWIS E. GATES 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD 
UNIVERSITY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1899 

All rights reserved 






24052 



Copyright, 1899, 

bt the macmillan company 













Norfooolr ^resg 

J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



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NOTE 

These Studies were originally introductory es- 
says in volumes of selections from the prose writ- 
ings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The essay 
on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My 
thanks are due to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the 
use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs. Henry 
Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on 
Newman and Arnold. 

December 15, 1898. 



CONTENTS 



Francis Jeffrey . . . . 

I. Jeffrey's Reputation 

11. General Characteristics . 

III. Literary Criticism . 

IV. The Edinburgh Revieiv . 
V. The New Editorial Policy 

VI. The New Literary Form 

VII. Conclusion 



Newman as a Prose- Writer 

I. Newman's Manner and its Critics 

11. The Rhetorician 

IIL Methods 

IV. Irony 

V. Style 

VI. Additional Characteristics 

VII. Relation to his Times . 



1 

1 

6 

12 

41 
46 
54 
59 

64 
64 

72 
82 
88 
92 
98 
108 



L-' 



l^" 



viii 


CONTENTS 












PAGE 


Matthew 


Arnold 124 


I. 


Arnold's Manner 










. 124 


II. 


Criticism of Life 










129 


III. 


Theory of Culture 










. 139 


IV. 


Ethical Bias . 










151 


V. 


Literary Criticism 










163 


VI. 


Appreciations 










171 


VII. 


Style 










180 


VIII. 


Relation to his Times 








200 



FRANCIS JBFFEET 



Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may 
be feared, who are intent on some scholarly pur- 
pose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809 
Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the Edin- 
hurgh Review were read by fifty thousand thinking 
people within a month after publication. Jef- 
frey's reputation as a critic has run through a pict- 
uresquely varied course. During nearly the first 
half of the century he was, for many eminently 
intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible au- 
thority in letters and whatever pertained to them. 
He was Horner's and Sydney Smith's " King Jam- 
fray " ; he was for Macaulay " more nearly a uni- 
versal genius than any man of our time." Even 
Carlyle declared, no critic since Jeffrey's day 
"worth naming beside him." And when that 
half -national institution, the Encyclopcedia Britan- 
nica, required in its columns a discussion of the 
theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as 
an authority and wrote the article on " Beauty " 
that, down to 1875, stood as representing authentic 
English opinion in matters of taste. 
B 1 



2 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

Even those wlio hated Jeffrey admitted his 
power. "Birds seldom sing," quoth Allan Cun- 
ningham, " when the kite is in the air, and bards 
dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as 
political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of 
James the Second." Talfourd, Lamb's friend 
and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that "with little 
imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view 
of any great and central principles of criticism, he 
. . . continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occa- 
sionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at 
one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in 
his hands." 

By way of final testimony to the magnitude of 
Jeffrey's fame, Macaulay and Carlyle may be 
quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay's 
letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions 
of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been stay- 
ing; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed 
hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic's 
appearance or habits or opinions are too slight 
to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. 
" He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other 
as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's. . . . The 
mere outline of his face is insignificant. The ex- 
pression is everything; and such power and variety 
of expression I never saw in any human counte- 
nance. . . . The flow of his kindness is quite 
inexhaustible. . . . His conversation is very 
much like his countenance and his voice, of im- 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 3 

mense variety. ... He is a slirewd observer; 
and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the 
awe in which many people seem to stand when in 
his company." ^ These are only a few of Macau- 
lay's details and admiring comments. Nor did 
he outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 
1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has 
read and reread Jeffrey's old articles till he knows 
them by heart; and in December, 1843, on the 
appearance of Jeffrey's collected essays, he ex- 
presses himself in almost unmeasured terms: 
"The variety and versatility of Jeffrey's mind 
seem to me more extraordinary than ever. . . . 
I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, 
nay that any three men, could have produced such 
diversified excellence. . . . Take him all in all, 
I think him more nearly an universal genius than 
any man of our time." ^ 

Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond 
suspicion as a witness in Jeffrey's favour. He 
himself had much of Jeffrey's dryness and posi- 
tiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited 
in many of the same ways, and was, like Jeffrey, 
an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type ; for all 
these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In 
Carlyle, on the other hand, we have a witness who 
was as far as possible from sympathy with Jef- 
frey's neat little formulas in art and in poli- 

1 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3. 

2 Ibid., chap. 9. 



4 FKANCIS JEFFREY 

tics, and who has never been accused of register- 
ing unduly charitable opinions of even his best 
friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, "It is certain 
there has no Critic appeared among us since who 
was worth naming beside him; — and his influ- 
ence, for good and for evil, in Literature and 
otherwise, has been very great. . . . His Ed- 
inburgh Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, 
and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of 
what is called the 'Intelligent Public'; and him- 
self regarded universally as a man of consummate 
penetration, and the facile princeps in the depart- 
ment he had chosen to cultivate and practise."^ 

How has it happened that Jeffrey's lustre, once 
so brilliant, has paled in our day into that of a 
fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier reputation 
wholly undeserved? Or is the "dumb forgetful- 
ness " that has overtaken him a real case of literary 
injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now oftenest re- 
membered for his unluckily haughty reprimand 
to Wordsworth, " This will never do ! " — a sen- 
tence which is popularly taken to be an incontes- 
table proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards 
the artistic worth of the Excursion, the poem 
against which Jeffrey was protesting, judges are 
at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than 
with Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, 
then, to benefit somewhat from the latter-day reac- 
tion against overweening Komanticism ? 

1 Carlyle's Beminiscences, II, 271. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 5 

Doubtless, Jeffrey's fate is in part merely an 
illustration of the transiency of critical fame. 
Jeffrey, like Eymer and John Dennis, has gone 
the deciduous way of all writers of literature about 
literature, save the few who have been actually 
themselves, in their prose, creators of beauty. 
Yet probably there is also something exceptional 
in Jeffrey's case, — in his earlier complete ascen- 
dency and in the later sorry disinheriting that has 
overtaken him. Jeffrey's reputation was really a 
composite affair, due fully as much to the timely- 
happy establishment of the Edinburgh Review as 
to his own personal cleverness, great as that was. 
On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shin- 
ing success of the first brilliant English Review. 
To understand, then, the waxing and the waning of 
Jeffrey's literary reputation, a somewhat careful 
analysis will be needed not simply of his critical 
genius, but also of the methods for making that 
genius effective which fortune offered him and his 
own keen practical instincts worked out success- 
fully. As for his individual worth as a critic, the 
truth will be found to lie, as so often happens, 
about midway between the eulogists and the cavil- 
lers. Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey 
was a notably effective critic; he made blunders 
not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and sug- 
gestive, even when he went astray; he excelled 
in rapid analysis, apt illustration, and audacious 
satire. He developed critical method in two very 



6 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

important directions, and seized upon and applied, 
with at least partial success, two critical princi- 
ples, hardly recognized in England before his day, 
but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully 
employed. All these are points, however, that 
need to be minutely dealt with and illustrated. 



II 



It was on Jeffrey's versatility — the universality 
of his genius — that Macaulay's comments in 1843 
laid special stress. That versatility remains note- 
worthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern lit- 
erary critic would venture on the vast range of 
subjects that Jeffrey, even in the seventy or eighty 
of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has 
magisterially dealt with. His Collected Essays 
are arranged under the following seven headings : 
General Literature; History; Poetry; Philosophy 
of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; 
Prose Fiction; General Politics; Miscellaneous. 
Under all these headings the works of distin- 
guished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer 
declaims and dogmatizes like an expert, whether 
he be holding forth on philosophy to Dugald Stew- 
art or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or 
on poetry to Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident 
universality is nowadays sure to suggest shallow- 
ness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 7 

years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety 
of topics so as to command the thorough respect 
even of his opponents, and so as not simply to 
avoid any scandalous misadventure through false 
information or inept judgments (unless in the case 
of Wordsworth), but to rule almost arbitrarily a 
great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, 
and in literary and artistic theory. To carry 
through successfully so difficult a task is in itself 
a victory to be put to the credit of the audacious 
Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in 
all cases of permanent worth. 

A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness 
and attractiveness in exposition were doubtless 
largely responsible for Jeffrey's constant success 
with his public. But, in addition to these formal 
excellences, Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped 
and well trained for the part of a universal genius. 
Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him 
to prepare himself during a good many years of 
faithful study for just the part he was to play. 
When he had to choose a profession he decided 
for the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 
1796. But both before this decision and dur- 
ing his actual legal studies, he read widely and 
systematically by himself in general literature, 
political theory, history, and philosophy; and dur- 
ing all this patient, private reading, at Glasgow 
University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Ox- 
ford, he was busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at 



8 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

note-books, in which facts and ideas and theoriz- 
ings were recorded and worked out. His mind 
was conspicuously vivacious and alert, — swift to 
catch up and make its own new knowledge, whether 
about books or life. This keenness of intellectual 
scent was always characteristic of him. Even 
Matthew Arnold has conceded to him one trait of 
the ideal critic — curiosity. A very different com- 
mentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, 
after a call from him, of his " dark, penetrating " 
eyes, that " had been taking note of most things in 
God's universe." 

Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, 
and of this wide ranging and swiftly appropriating 
intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in a very high 
degree, the barrister's power of seizing, compre- 
hending, and controlling, quickly and surely, a 
vast mass of new facts. He could "get up" an 
unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness 
and completeness. His mastery of his subject in 
a review-article seems often like the successful 
barrister's knowledge of his brief: he knows what- 
ever he needs to know to carry the matter in hand 
triumphantly through. 

His way of unfolding a subject is always deft 
and delightful to follow. He had a sure exposi- 
tory instinct. Point by point, the most complex 
problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a 
specious simplicity, and the most abstract theorem, 
alluring familiarity, and definiteness. He is gen- 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 9 

erous with illustrations and examples and mis- 
chievous in giving them a satirical turn. Despite 
his Scotch bias towards theorizing, he knows and 
" hugs " his facts, and his discussions always keep 
close to experience. 

His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work 
be compared with that of eighteenth-century critics. 
Whatever the book or question under discussion, 
Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, 
and is not content with formal judgments of literary 
worth or with random comments on special points. 
He is really bent on setting up "a free play of 
ideas" over the literature and the modes of life 
that he criticises, and on orienting his readers as 
regards not simply the special work under discus- 
sion, but the whole field of art or of study to which 
it belongs. That his theories, at least in literary 
matters, were not always searching or profound, 
that they will not, in sweep and thoroughness, bear 
comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, 
the great system-weaver of the Komanticists, is 
undoubtedly true. Yet even in literary theory Jef- 
frey, as will be presently shown, hit on some 
notable truths; he partially comprehended and 
applied the historical method for the study of lit- 
erature ; he worked out with Alison an interpreta- 
tion of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis 
and distorted, recognized and illustrated with great 
acuteness one highly important and comparatively 
neglected source of aesthetic emotion; and, despite 



10 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and 
much insensibility to its quintessential power and 
charm, he showed his critical insight in his protests 
against certain radical defects alike in the ethical 
and in the aesthetic theory of the Romanticists, — 
defects which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern 
criticism admits, do much to invalidate Romantic 
poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a perma- 
nently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But 
even apart from the absolute correctness or finality 
of Jeffrey's theorizing, his practice of raising criti- 
cism into the region of general principles and of 
examining the material worth of books even more 
searchingly than their barely formal qualities, was a 
renovating change in criticism, and at once gave 
new consideration and dignity to the work of the 
critic. Mind was at any rate fermenting in what- 
ever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most part the writ- 
ing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste 
of words. 

Finally, Jeffrey's style startled and challenged 
and terrified and amused, and through its briskness 
and audacity, its swift sparkle and gay bravado, 
its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and 
unfailing wealth of fact and illustration fairly cap- 
tivated a public that was used to the humdrum, 
conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. 
There is a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that 
leads continually to very grateful ridicule of 
pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 11 

Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if lie be 
not an ingrained prig, relish Jeffrey's raillery at 
the expense of Wordsworth's occasional pompous 
ineptitude. And if Jeffrey's vivacity still seems 
amusing, how much more irresistible must his 
style have seemed before the days of Hazlitt and 
Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and 
wit and audacity were new in literary criticism, 
and for the time being seemed to the public almost 
more than mortal. 

Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey's 
genius and style are those of the ideal literary 
critic, they were fitted to gain him success and re- 
nown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary 
topics. And, in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey 
really was; he was a typically well equipped and 
skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increas- 
ingly large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have 
its beliefs expressed plausibly, its feelings justi- 
fied, and its taste made clear to itself and gently 
improved. The Whig "sheep looked up," and 
Jeffrey fed them. He did much the same work in 
general literary, social, and political theory that 
Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay's histori- 
cal essays, also published in the Edinburgh Heview, 
were, as Cotter Morison has pointed out, "great 
historical cartoons," specially adapted for the 
popularization of history, and specially suited to 
the knowledge and aspirations of an intelligent 
middle-class public. Jeffrey's essays in literature 



12 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

had much this same character and value. They 
interpreted the freshest, most vital thought of the 
time, so far as possible in harmony with Whig 
formulas, and judged it by Whig standards ; they 
made happily articulate Whig prejudices on all 
subjects, from the French Eevolution to Words- 
worth's peasant poetry. By their masterly exposi- 
tion, their incisive argument, and their wit, they 
entertained even those whom they exasperated. 
Their success was prompt and unexampled. 

Ill 

It has already been hinted that the qualities of 
Jeffrey's genius and style, great as may have been 
their value for the work he accomplished, are not, 
when judged from the modern point of view, alto- 
gether those of the ideal literary critic. This is 
particularly true if appreciation be included as 
a vital part of the critic's task. Jeffrey rarely 
appreciates a piece of literature, interprets it 
imaginatively, lends himself to its peculiar charm, 
and expresses this charm through sympathetic 
symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility 
are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic 
suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects 
as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. 
He is always for or against his author; he is 
always making points. The intellectual interest 
preponderates in his critical work, and his discus- 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 13 

sions often seem, particularly to a reader of mod- 
ern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, 
searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and 
systematic. He is always on the watch ; he never 
lends himself confidingly to his author and takes 
passively and gratefully the mood and the images 
his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. 
He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually 
distracts his readers with his sense of the need of 
making definite progress. He is one of those re- 
sponsible folk who believe that 

" Nothing of itself will come 
But we must still be seeking." 

Eor delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the 
best modern type it is useless to look in Jeffrey^s 
essays. 

Of course, historically, such criticism could 
hardly have been expected in 1803. The critical 
tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of the 
dogmatists, — the tradition that came down from 
Ascham, the pedagogue, through the hands of the 
would-be autocrats, Rymer and Dennis, to Dr. 
Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered 
many changes, but remained nevertheless true to 
one fundamental principle: the critic was to be 
accepted as an infallible judge in literature because 
of his familiarity with certain models or certain 
abstract rules, the imitation or the observance of 
which was essential to good art. The dogmatic 



14 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind 
of divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary- 
artistic inspiration of the Greek and Latin classics, 
and posed as the authentic interpreter of the sacred 
literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Eymer 
and Dennis, based themselves also partly on au- 
thority, but even more upon reason ; they pretended 
to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their 
implicit postulate might be likened to Hobbes's 
theory in politics ; they substantially held that the 
strongest must keep order in the commonwealth, 
and that in the literary commonwealth this duty 
fell to the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, 
these critics administered justice magisterially in 
accordance with a strict code of laws; they had 
laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of com- 
edy, laws for the satirist, laws for the writer of 
tragedy; the author of every new piece of litera- 
ture was called up to the bar and reprimanded for 
the least illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic 
regarded himself and was generally regarded as 
able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary 
work, and as the final authority on all doubtful 
matters of taste. 

Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition 
in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its 
tyrannical tone and manner towards public and 
authors. Yet, following his temperamental fond- 
ness for compromises, for middle parties and medi- 
ating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 15 

defend this old doctrine or represented himself as 
an absolute lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does 
he lay down a complete set of principles, like the 
rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Eapin 
for the drama, by which excellence in any form of 
literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high- 
and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest 
itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste 
as in politics, and desires in both spheres the 
supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay 
on Scott's Lady of the Lake he declares the stand- 
ard of literary excellence to reside in " the taste of 
a few . . . persons, eminently qualified, by natural 
sensibility and long experience and reflection, to 
perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to 
settle the relative value and importance of all the 
different sorts of beauty." Jeffrey regards himself 
as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aris- 
tocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best cur- 
rent opinion that he speaks on all questions of 
taste. 

It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with 
purely literary questions, he is less argumentative 
than at other times, and that what has been said of 
his viewing every subject in the light of general 
principles is least applicable to his dogmatic essays 
on literature. When, for example, he attacks 
Wilhelm Meister or the Excursion, he does so sim- 
ply and frankly in terms of his temperament. 
Wordsworth's mysticism baffles him, and he con- 



16 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

demns it; Goethe's sordid realism and sentiment 
offend liis man-of-the-world taste and he anathe- 
matizes them. His custom in such hostile criti- 
cisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of 
"the judicious observer" or "the modern public." 
His faith in his own personal equation is unques- 
tioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in with 
his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. 
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for example, is "sheer 
nonsense," "ludicrously unnatural," full of "pure 
childishness or mere folly," "vulgar and obscure," 
full of "absurdities and affectations." These 
terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions 
for Jeffrey's dislike, mere roundabout ways of say- 
ing that the book is not to his taste. As for com- 
ing to an understanding with author or reader about 
the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of 
reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such 
an attempt. He simply takes up various passages 
and declares he does not comprehend them, or does 
not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not 
like the author's ideas or methods. He gives no 
reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content 
to express them emphatically and picturesquely. 
This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and 
a dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dog- 
matism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary 
and more challenging. Of this tone and method, 
Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of 
his BiograpJiia Literaria, when, in commenting on 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 17 

current critical literature, he protests against " the 
substitution of assertion for argument " and against 
"the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant 
verdicts." 

But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning 
dogmatism, it is nevertheless plainly a step for- 
ward from the view that makes the critic absolute 
lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics 
is midway between absolute monarchy and de- 
mocracy, so what we may term the Whig com- 
promise in criticism stands midway between the 
tyranny of earlier critics and our modern freedom. 
The mere recognition of the fact that the critic 
speaks with authority only as representing a coterie^ 
only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a 
change for the better. The critic no longer re- 
gards himself as by divine right lord alike of pub- 
lic and authors ; he no longer measures literary 
success solely by changeless, abstract formulas of 
excellence; he admits more or less explicitly that 
the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from 
the works of dead writers, must decide what in 
literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, 
limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards 
as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle 
has implicitly been accepted, and that the way is 
opened for the development and recognition of all 
kinds of beauty and power the public may require. 

Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have 
suspected the conclusions that might legitimately 



18 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to 
make current. He seems to have had no qualm of 
doubt touching his right to dogmatize on the merits 
and defects of art as violently as a critic of the 
older school. In theory, he held that all artistic 
excellence is relative; but in practice, he never let 
this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judg- 
ments. He asserts in his review of Alison on 
Taste that "what a man feels distinctly to be 
beautiful, is beautiful to him"; and that so far as 
the individual is concerned all pleasure in art 
is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine 
seems never to have paralyzed in the least his faith 
in the superior worth of his owii kind of pleasure ; 
and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as 
indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, 
as if he had some abstract standard of poetic 
excellence, of which he could prove they fell 
short. 

When we try to define Jeffrey's taste and to de- 
termine just what he liked and disliked in litera- 
ture, we find an odd combination of sympathies 
and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken 
of him as in politics an eighteenth-century sur- 
vival;^ but this formula, apt as it is for his poli- 
tics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. 
The typical eighteenth-century man of letters was 
a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the pseudo-classi- 
cal point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as cer- 

1 Hours in a Library, III, 176. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 19 

tainly as he had never reached the Komantic point 
of view. Of Pope, for example, he says: he is 
" much the best we think of the classical Conti- 
nental school; but he is not to be compared with 
the masters — nor with the pupils — of that Old 
English one from which there had been so lamen- 
table an apostasy." Addison he condemns for his 
"extreme caution, timidity, and flatness," and he 
declares that "the narrowness of his range in 
poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want 
either of passion or of brilliancy, render it diffi- 
cult to believe that he was born under the same 
sun with Shakespeare." These opinions are proof 
patent of Jeffrey^s contempt for pseudo-classicism. 
Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself boasts, almost 
superstitious in his reverence for Shakespeare. 
More significant still is his admiration for other 
Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, 
Eord, and Webster. " Of the old English drama- 
tists, " he assures us in his essay on Ford, " it may 
be said, in general, that they are more poetical, 
and more original in their diction, than the drama- 
tists of any other age or country. Their scenes 
abound more in varied images, and gratuitous ex- 
cursions of fancy. Their illustrations and figures 
of speech are more borrowed from rural life, and 
from the simple occupations or universal feelings 
of mankind. They are not confined to a certain 
range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a 
particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it 



20 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

is not lawful to look for embellishments." Finally, 
he even commends Coleridge's great favourite, 
Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as Coleridge 
himself could do: "There is in any one of the 
prose folios of Jeremy Taylor," he asserts, "more 
fine fancy and original imagery — more brilliant 
conceptions and glowing expressions — more new 
figures, and new applications of old figures — 
more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, 
than in all the odes and the epics that have since 
been produced in Europe." 

Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any 
rate, not an eighteenth-century survival; they must 
be duly borne in mind when a formula is being 
sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant, 
though in a different way, is the series of essays 
on the poet Crabbe. If the praise of the Eliza- 
bethans seems to argue an almost Eomantic bias in 
Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are 
very like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the 
Crabbe essays at once reveal his antipathy to the 
men of the new age and show how far he is from 
even being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy 
in peace and obscurity. 

Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by 
implication condemning Wordsworth; nor does he 
confine himself to this roundabout method of at- 
tacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on 
Crabbe (1807), he turns aside from his subject to 
ridicule by name, "the Wordsworths, and the 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 21 

Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious 
fraternity," and contrasts at great length Crabbe's 
sanity with Wordsworth's mysticism. "Mr. 
Crabbe exhibits the common people of England 
pretty much as they are " ; whereas " Mr. Words- 
worth and his associates . . . introduce us to 
beings whose existence was not previously sus- 
pected by the acutest observers of nature ; and ex- 
cite an interest for them — where they do excite 
any interest — more by an eloquent and refined 
.analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by 
any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in 
their situation." With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he 
is on solid ground, dealing with a man who sees 
life clearly and sensibly, as he himself sees it; and 
in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity of 
Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, 
and of his freedom from all meretricious effects, 
from affectation, and from absurd mysticism, we 
have at once the measure of Jeffrey's poetic sensi- 
bility and the sure evidence of his inability to 
sympathize genuinely with "the Lakers." 

Of course, for the classic passages expressing his 
impatience of the new movement, we must go to 
the essays on Wordsworth's Excursion and Wliite 
Doe. Jeffrey's objections to the Lakers fall under ^ 
four heads : First, the new poets are nonsensically 
mystical; secondly, they falsify life by showing it 
through a distorting medium of personal emotion, 
i.e. they are misleadingly subjective ; thirdly, they 



22 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their demo- 
cratic realism; fourthly, they are pedantically 
earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and 
inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a 
new gospel of life. Mysticism, intense individu- 
ality of feeling, naturalism, and "high serious- 
ness," — these were the qualities that in the new 
art particularly exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch 
as these were the very qualities to which, in the 
eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special 
potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Eo- 
manticists was sufficiently deep and irreconcilable. 
Wordsworth's transcendentalism, his intense 
spiritual consciousness, his inveterate fashion of 
apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual 
force and of converting "this whole Of suns and 
worlds and men " and " all that it inherits " into a 
series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral and 
spiritual truth, — these qualities of Wordsworth's 
genius were for his admirers among his most char- 
acteristic sources of power, and tended to place him 
as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those 
Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition 
to the eighteenth century, pretended to reverence. 
But these were just the qualities in Wordsworth's 
genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. 
After quoting a typical passage where Words- 
worth's transcendentalism finds free utterance, 
Jeffrey exclaims: "This is a fair sample of that 
rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehen- 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 23 

sion, and fills the despairing reader with painful 
giddiness and terror." Jeffrey's woe is by no 
means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole 
mental life was perturbed by such of Wordsworth's 
poems as the great Ode, and that it was an act of 
self-preservation on his part to burst into indig- 
nant ridicule and violent protest. To find a man 
of Wordsworth's age and literary experience de- 
liberately penning such bewildering stanzas and 
expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for 
the moment Jeffrey's faith in his own little, well- 
ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from 
his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt 
secure once more in the clear, every-day light of 
common sense, led him into fierce invective against 
the cause of his momentary panic. 

Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Words- 
worth's subjectivity than of his mysticism. Why 
cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people 
feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of 
the world feels about it? When such a man sees 
a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool, he 
pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks 
on, speculating about the state of the poor law; 
Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into a strange 
fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and 
"mighty poets in their misery dead," and then in 
some mysterious fashion converts the peasant's 
stolidity into a defence against these gloomy 
thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems 



24 FKANCIS JEFFREY 

to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiablej both because of its 
grotesque mysticism, and because it thrusts a per- 
sonal mo^i/ discourteously into the face of the pub- 
lic and falsifies ludicrously the peasant's character 
and life. Wordsworth has no right, Jeffrey in- 
sists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol of 
his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest 
against Wordsworth's mysticism, Jeffrey pleads 
for common sense and the commonplace ; he is the 
type of what Lamb calls "the Caledonian intel- 
lect," which rejects scornfully ideas that cannot 
be adequately expressed in good plain terms, and 
grasped " by twelve men on a jury. " 

Crabbe's superiority to the Lakers lies for Jef- 
frey chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyn- 
crasies, though he has many mannerisms; he 
expresses no new theories and no peculiar emo- 
tions in his portrayal of common life. Hence his 
choice of vulgar subjects is endurable — even 
highly commendable. His peasants are the well- 
known peasants of every-day England, with whose 
hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sym- 
pathize — from a distance. But a realism that, 
like Wordsworth's, professes to find in these poor 
peasants the deepest spiritual insight and the 
purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jef- 
frey grotesque in its maladroitness and confusion 
of values. Sydney Smith used to say, "If I am 
doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the 
slave of a king than a cobbler." And this same 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 25 

prejudice against any topsy-turvy reassignment of 
values was largely responsible for Jeffrey's dislike 
of Wordsworth's peasants and of liis treatment of 
common life. If peasants keep their places, as 
Crabbe's peasants do, they may perfectly well be 
brought into the precints of poetry; but to exalt 
them into types of moral virtue and into heavenly 
messengers of divine truth, is to " make tyrants of 
cobblers." Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to 
Jeffrey detestable. 

In fact, all the pretensions of the new school 
to illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were 
intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as 
Ebmanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott 
or Keats, Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight 
in it. But the moment it began, whether in Byron 
or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to 
struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, 
Jeffrey protested. Just here lies the key to what 
some critics have found a rather perplexing prob- 
lem, — the reasons for the varying degrees of Jef- 
frey's sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the 
poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere 
magician calling up by his incantations in verse a 
gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for 
the delectation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will 
consent to admire him and will commend his fer- 
tility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his 
"rich lights of fancy," and "his flowers of poetry." 
Keats's luxuriant pictures of Greek life in Endym- 



26 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

ion, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the "intoxication 
of their sweetness" and in "the enchantments 
which they so lavishly present." Moore and Camp- 
bell, he regards as the most admirable of the Ro- 
manticists, and their works as the very best of the 
somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 
1829, he arranges recent poets in the following 
order, according to the probable duration of their 
fame': "The tuneful quartos of Southey are 
already little better than lumber : — and the rich 
melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the fantas- 
tical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian 
pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field 
of our view. The novels of Scott have put out his 
poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are 
fading into distance and dimness . . . and the 
blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its 
place of pride. . . . The two who have the long- 
est withstood this rapid withering of the laurel 
. . . are Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, 
it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both 
distinguished rather for the fine taste and consum- 
mate elegance of their writings, than for that fiery 
passion, and disdainful vehemence, which seemed 
for a time to be so much more in favour with the 
public." Now a glance at Jeffrey's list of poets 
makes it clear that those for whom he prophesies 
lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or decora-'^ 
tive Romanticists, and that those whose day he de- 
clares to be over are for the most part poets whose 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 27 

Romanticism was a vital principle. Rogers is, of 
course, a genuine representative of the pseudo- 
classical tradition, with all its devotion to form, 
its self-restraint, its poverty of imagination, and 
its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey places 
late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, 
whom he finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, 
are both in a way Romanticists ; but they are alike 
in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not 
taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as 
the fire and the heat of Romanticism spent them- 
selves merely in giving imaginative splendour to 
style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and 
could even regard it with favour, as a return to 
that power and fervour and wild beauty that he had 
taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. 
But the moment the new energy was suffered to 
penetrate life itself and to convert the conventional 
world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of 
passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then 
Jeffrey stood aghast at what seemed to him a re^, 
turn to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of self- 
ish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing 
consciousness of the infinite, and Shelley with his 
"white heat of transcendentalism," were all alike 
for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and un- 
healthy phenomena. 

For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic 
poetry, Jeffrey indulges in little philosophizing; 
he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and clever 



28 FRANCIS JEFFREY * 

self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there 
is a vital connection between his rejection of Eo- 
manticism and his abstract theorizings on beauty, 
— small pains as he has taken to bring out this 
obscure relationship. A complete account of his 
temperament and taste ought to show how the same 
instincts that led to his hostility to Wordsworth 
and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and 
tried to justify themselves, through the theory of 
Beauty which he worked out with Alison's help. 

According to Jeffrey's account of the matter, a 
beautiful object owes its beauty to its power to call 
up in the observer latent past experiences of pleas- 
ure and pain. These little fragments of past joy 
and sorrow gather closely round the object and blend 
in a kind of blurred halo of delight which we call 
beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out upon 
a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road 
calls back to him (though without his conscious 
recognition of the fact) leisurely afternoon drives ; 
the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past 
sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and 
rustic prosperity; the cottages surreptitiously 
wake memories of home joys and content about 
the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners 
out of the summer landscape a myriad evanescent 
associations with past life, which, too slight and 
swift to be detected separately by thought, never- 
theless unite like the harmonics of a musical note 
to produce the peculiar character that we call 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 29 

beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it fol- 
lows that every individual's past will limit and 
create for him his beauty in the present; his fore- 
gone pleasures and pains will alone make possible 
those echoes of intense feeling which in the present 
combine into the single chord of beauty. Accord- 
ing to every man's past, then, is his present sense 
of beauty ; and as no two men have the same past, 
no two men can have the same perceptions of 
beauty in the present. 

Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions 
involved in this doctrine, and asserts that beauty 
is wholly relative; that whatever seems to a man 
beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible 
debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty 
that a man's special temperament manufactures. 
So long as a man confines himself to enjoying 
beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic 
region of his own private experience. But the 
moment he offers himself as a creator or interpreter 
of beauty for others, he must take into account the 
scope and nature of common experience and try to 
appeal imaginatively to associations which are 
likely to be in the hearts of all. This is precisely, 
Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Eomanticists 
like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They 
tried to impose on the public their own curiously 
Whimsical associations of pleasure and pain; they 
were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that 
their own quaint, country-side blisses and sorrows 



30 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

and their own droll exaltations and despairs over 
peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must 
have universal value for mankind. Here for Jef- 
frey lay the wilful and colossal egotism of Eoman- 
tic art; and once more we find him posing as the 
foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as 
the representative of a cultivated aristocracy of 
intelligence and social experience and taste, who, 
after all, have something like a common fund of 
feelings and associations on which art can draw. 

As for the actual worth of Jeffrey's theory of 
beauty, its fault lies in trying to stretch into a 
universal formula what is really only a partial ex- 
planation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey 
lays stress on — the kind of beauty that comes from 
the suggestiveness of objects — is duly recognized 
nowadays under the name of beauty of expression. 
The possible origin of beauty through association 
of ideas had not been thoroughly considered 
before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their 
work was therefore new and historically important. 
But beside beauty that comes from this source, — 
beside beauty of expression, — there are beauty of 
form and beauty of material; neither of these is 
recognized by Jeffrey as an independent variety, 
and examples of each he tries, with really heroic 
ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The 
beauty of a Greek temple is explained as depending 
solely on a swift, unconscious recognition of the 
stability, costliness, splendour, and antiquity of 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 31 

the structure. The beauty of special colours or of 
chords of music is derived, not at all from the in- 
trinsic quality of the sensations, — the hue or the 
musical sound, — but wholly from subtle associa- 
tions with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey's 
theory becomes distorted and misleading in spite 
of the truthfulness of much of his observation 
and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of 
his interpretations. The quintessential in art, the 
pleasure that art gives through pure form and the 
inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is least 
sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at 
and trying to forget or to account for as merely 
disguised human sympathy. 

Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey's quarrel 
with Eomanticism, his theory of beauty is of 
special significance because it emphasizes the genu- 
ineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All 
artistic pleasure is for Jeffrey merely human sym- 
pathy in masquerade — past love for one's fel- 
lows, delicately revived in the music of art. The 
only man, then, who can have a wide range of 
artistic pleasure is he who in the past has shared 
generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding 
this theory of art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism 
naturally laid great stress on the ethical qualities 
of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface 
to his Collected Essays, Jeffrey claims special credit 
for his frequent use of the ethical point of view. 
" If I might be permitted farther, to state, in what 



32 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

particular department, and generally, on account 
of what, I should most wish to claim a . share of 
those merits, I should certainly say, that it was by 
having constantly endeavoured to combine Ethical 
precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly 
sought to impress my readers with a sense, both 
of the close connection between sound intellectual 
attainments and the higher elements of duty and 
enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subor- 
dination of the former to the latter. The praise, 
in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which I 
am conscious that my efforts were most constantly 
directed, is, that I have, more uniformly and 
earnestly than any preceding critic, made the Moral 
tendencies of the works under consideration a lead- 
ing subject of discussion." 

This "proud claim," as Jeffrey calls it, seems 
amply justified when we compare Jeffrey's essays 
either with the critical essays in the earlier Eeviews, 
or with the more formal and elaborate critical es- 
says of the eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson 
with all his didacticism had little notion of extract- 
ing from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of 
good or of evil by which it draws men this way or 
that way in conduct. An obvious infringement of 
good morals in speech or in plot he was sure to 
condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth 
he was sure to recognize and approve. But neither 
in Johnson, nor anywhere else before Jeffrey, do 
we find a critic constantly attempting to detect 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 33 

and define the moral atmosphere that pervades 
the whole work of an author, and to determine the 
relation between this moral atmosphere and the 
author's personality as man and as artist. To 
have perceived the value of this ethical criticism, 
to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered 
a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction ; 
and Jeffrey's services in these directions have been 
too often forgotten. The greater breadth of view 
of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethi- 
cal values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey 
of his honour as a pioneer in ethical criticism. 

For still another innovation in critical methods, 
Jeffrey was at least partly responsible. He was 
among the earliest English critics to see the im- 
portance for the study of literature of the histori- 
cal point of view and to take into close account, in 
the study of an author or of a whole literature, the 
social environment. Not that Jeffrey was one of 
the original minds who first conceived of the his- 
torical method of study in its application to art, 
and worked out for themselves conceptions of lit- 
erature as a growth and development and as de- 
pendent upon the spirit of the age and upon social 
conditions. Jeffrey, it can hardly be doubted, 
was merely a clever borrower. Long before his 
day, the principles underlying the historical con- 
ception of literature had been worked out in Ger- 
many, and had been applied by Herder and Goethe, 
and their disciples, for the solution of problems 



34 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

in criticism. Of this German theorizing Jeffrey 
can hardly have had direct knowledge. But to 
Madame de Stael, who was an adept in German 
speculation, Jeffrey probably owed much, — both 
to her teaching and to her example. Her De la 
Utterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les insti- 
tutions sodales had appeared in France in 1800, and 
her De VAllemagne, a study of German life and 
literature conceived throughout in strict harmony 
with the principles of the historical method, was 
published in 1810. Now it is in 1811 that an un- 
mistakable broadening of method may be discerned 
in Jeffrey^s literary criticism. His essay on Ford's 
Dramatic Works (August, 1811) is remarkable for 
its rapid survey of the whole development of 
English literature, its brilliant generalizations as 
regards the characteristics of such definite periods 
as that of the Eestoration, and its fairly successful 
attempts to account for these characteristics as the 
outcome in each case of the social conditions of the 
time. Before 1811, or at any rate before 1810, 
Jeffrey never gets, in his study of an author, beyond 
the biographical point of view. He may consider 
psychological questions, — the characteristics of 
an author's mind that have impressed themselves 
on his book, or the nature of the public taste to 
which literature of a certain kind caters. But 
the sociological origin of a literary school or a 
writer has not before that time troubled Jeffrey. 
After the Ford essay the historical and the socio- 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 35 

logical points of view are used rather frequently, 
though it must be admitted with uncertain success 
and not with entire loyalty. 

Perhaps Jeffrey's most interesting actual discus- 
sion of the historical method occurs in the intro- 
duction to his essay on Wilhelm MeisteVy written in 
1825. In this introduction he tries to classify the 
influences that mould literature and guide its de- 
velopment, and his formulas are curiously sugges- 
tive of the much later and rather famous theorizing 
of the French critic, Taine. Jeffrey does not rec- 
ognize race — the first of Taine's forces; "human 
nature," Jeffrey asserts, "is everywhere funda- 
mentally the same." But for Taine's two other 
sets of forces which he groups under the names 
moment and milieu, close equivalents may be found 
in Jeffrey's formulas. "The circumstances," he 
asserts, "which have distinguished [literature] 
into so many local varieties . . . may be divided 
into two great classes, — the one embracing all 
that relates to the newness or antiquity of the 
society to which they belong, or, in other words, to 
the stage which any particular nation has attained 
in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in 
which all are engaged; the other comprehending 
what may be termed the accidental causes by which 
the character and condition of communities may be 
affected; such as their government, their relative 
position as to power and civilization to neighbour- 
ing countries, their prevailing occupations, deter- 



36 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

mined in some degree by the capabilities of their 
soil and climate." Of these principles, Jeffrey goes 
on through a half-dozen paragraphs to make more 
special application; he describes certain kinds of 
literature, or certain characteristics of literature, 
that are apt to correspond to certain stages of civi- 
lization; he considers hastily some of the qualities 
impressed upon literature by different sorts of 
political institutions. All this general discussion, 
though decidedly in the air, is true and suggestive; 
it shows that by 1825 Jeffrey had a good deal of 
insight into the general theory of the dependence 
of literature on society. It must not be forgotten, 
however, in estimating Jeffrey's originality, that 
even in England Coleridge and Hazlitt had, for a 
good many years before the date of this Wilhelm 
Meister essay, been applying the historical method 
with insight and power for the explanation of 
literary problems. 

In point of fact, Jeffrey is usually much more 
impressive when he talks abstractly about the his- 
torical method than when he tries to apply it 
specifically. He is specially apt to be unhistorical 
when he treats of the beginnings either of litera- 
ture or of institutions. He lacked the knowledge 
of facts which alone could render possible a fruit- 
ful historical conception. His construction of 
early periods is always a priori in terms of a cheap 
psychology. His account, in the essay on LecMe, 
of the origin of government, should be compared 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 37 

with his description of the earliest attempts at 
poetic composition. In both cases he has a great 
deal to say about what "it was natural" for the 
earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim 
at and to effect, and substantially nothing to say 
of the actual facts as determined by investigation. 
Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for 
Jeffrey marvellously like eighteenth-century con- 
noisseurs, confronting consciously, and trying to 
solve reflectively, intricate problems in art or in 
politics. This view is, of course, unhistorical, 
and illustrates the difficulty Jeffrey had in escap- 
ing from old ways of thought. 

Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical 
method successfully to the study of any contem- 
porary piece of literature. In the essay on Wil- 
helm Meister, for example, the general account of 
the principles that underlie historical criticism is 
fluent and clear; but the change is abrupt and 
disastrous when Jeffrey turns to the particular 
discussion of Goethe's novels. Far from being 
historical or scientific, or trying to trace out in 
Goethe's work the significant forces that were 
shaping contemporary German life, Jeffrey merely 
gives himself over to railing at whatever jars on 
his personal taste. In short, half the essay is 
scientific and half purely dogmatic, and the two 
halves have scarcely any logical connection. Sad 
to say, Jeffrey nearly always bungled or faltered 
like this when trying to use the historical method, 



38 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

particularly when trying to interpret the literature 
of his own time. Other instances of his short- 
sightedness or clumsiness are to be found in his 
treatment of Byron and Wordsworth. He missed 
entirely the meaning of Byron's savage revolt 
against the conventionalism of eighteenth- century 
moral ideals, and he was equally unable to under- 
stand Wordsworth's high conservatism. Perhaps 
the most damaging accusation that can be brought 
against Jeffrey, as a critic, is inability to read and 
interpret the age in which he lived. 

Jeffrey's imperfect grasp of the historical 
method is shown in one other way: he never 
realized that there was any conflict between his 
work as a dogmatic critic and his work as a scien- 
tific student of literature, or had a premonition of 
the blighting effect that the spread of historical 
conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on 
the prestige of the dogmatic critic. More and 
more, since Jeffrey's day, criticism has concerned 
itself with the scientific explanation and the inter- 
pretation of literature ; less and less has it posed 
as the ultimate science of right thinking and right 
doing in literary art. This change has been 
brought about partly by the Eomantic movement 
with its fostering of individualism in art, and partly 
through the development of historical conceptions 
in all departments of thought. Both these forces 
were in full play during Jeffrey's life, and of neither 
did he at all measure the scope or significance. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 39 

Eegarded, then, from a modern point of view, 
Jeffrey, as a literary critic, takes shape somewhat 
as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly to 
seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and 
disputatiousness. As a dogmatic critic he is even 
yet thoroughly readable because of his dashing 
style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd 
common sense, and his sincerity; he expressed 
brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a large 
GiTqj.e of cultivated people of considerable social 
distinction, who, while not peculiarly artistic or 
literary, read widely and intelligently, and felt 
keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat 
limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, ' ^ 
however, his faults are obvious ; his dogmatism is 
peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his preju- 
dices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving 
a strong ethical trend to literary criticism, he 
deserves all honour. His social sympathies were 
intense and alert; they fixed the character of his 
whole theory of beauty, and continually expressed 
themselves in his comments upon books and au- 
thors. Through his persistently ethical interpre- 
tations of literature, he really enlarged the borders 
of literary criticism. As for his historical criti- 
cism, it cannot be said to have much permanent 
value. Into the general theory on which the use 
of the historical method rests, Jeffrey shows con- 
siderable insight ; but he was by nature and by 
training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of 



40 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

fact. Though his theorizings led him to believe 
speculatively in the relativity of beauty, and 
though he recognized abstractly that literature 
must vary from age to age as the time-spirit varies, 
yet he rarely let these convictions affect his tone 
or method in the treatment of literature; he is as 
round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or 
Pope as if he had never been within seeing dis- 
tance of the historical point of view. In short, 
the disinterestedness of science was foreign^ to 
j Jeffrey's nature; he was primarily and distinc- 
tively, not an investigator or interpreter, but a 
censor bent on praise or blame. 

These very characteristics of his criticism, how- 
ever, were of a kind to bring Jeffrey, in 1803, 
great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when 
the Tory Quarterly Review was founded, undis- 
guisedly thereafter, Jeffrey was the great Whig 
champion in all that pertained to letters. From a 
partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism 
was just what was sure to win the widest hearing. 
Moreover, in accounting for Jeffrey's enormous 
popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier 
review-writing must be kept in mind. Eeviewing 
had been the pet occupation of Grub street; penny- 
a-liners had impressed upon criticism all their own 
unloveliness and feebleness ; review articles seemed 
to issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anaemic 
bodies. Jeffrey's reviewing was the very incarna- 
tion of health, vigour, and prosperity. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 41 

Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more 
than it is easy now to compute from the happy op- 
portuneness of a new literary form, a literary form 
that was made possible through the establishment 
of the Edinburgh Review. This Review differed 
in many of its business arrangements and in its 
mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it 
was established in accordance with a new concep- 
tion of the scope of review-writing, and of the 
relation of reviewers to the public. As the result 
of this new conception and these new relations, 
literary criticism, which had hitherto been merely 
more or less ingenious talk about technical matters, 
was transformed into the earnest and vigorous dis- 
cussion of literature as the expression of all that 
was significant and absorbing in the life of the 
time. And as still further results of the new 
policy, reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto 
unknown honour; the Edinburgh Review was adored 
or was hated and feared throughout the length and 
breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally 
regarded as demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, 
penetration, and vigour. Much of Jeffrey's great 
prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his 
having long stood as the visible symbol of the suc- 
cess of the new style of reviewing. 

IV 

The story of the foundation of the Edinburgh 
Review has been told so often as hardly to bear 



42 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

repeating. Enough of the facts, however, must be 
gone over again to make clear the change that the 
new periodical wrought in reviewing and in the 
relations between critics and the public. 

The classical account of the origin of the Review 
is Sydney Smith's and is to be found in the Preface 
to his collected Worlis; it has been reproduced in 
Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey ^ and in the Life 
and Times of Lord Brougham.^ With his usual 
crabbedness Brougham disputes a few minor de- 
tails, but he leaves the substantial accuracy of 
" Sydney's " story unimpeached. 

The idea of the new Review was Sydney Smith's. 
The most important conspirators were Sydney, 
Jeffrey, Erancis Horner, and Brougham. The 
plot was discussed and matured in Jeffrey's house 
in Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh. Sydney Smith's 
famous proposal of a motto, Tenui musam medi- 
tamur avena, "We cultivate literature on a little 
oatmeal," was rejected; the "sage Horner's" sug- 
gestion was adopted, — a line from Publius Syrus, 
Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, which fore- 
told the righteous severity of tone that was to char- 
acterize the Revieiv, The first number was to have 
appeared in June, 1802, but, owing to dilatory con- 
tributors and Jeffrey's faintheartedness, was seri- 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey (ed. Philadelphia, 1852), 
I, 101 ff. 

2 The Life and Times of Lord Brougham (ed. New York, 
1871), I, 176 ff. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 43 

ously delayed; it finally appeared in October, 1802, 
under the supervision of Sydney Smith. After 
the publication of the first number Jeffrey was 
formally appointed editor, and, with some hesita- 
tion, accepted the post. 

The success of the Review was from the start 
beyond all expectation. "The effect," says Lord 
Cockburn, '' was electrical. And instead of expir- 
ing, as many wished, in their first effort, the force 
of the shock was increased on each subsequent dis- 
charge. It is impossible for those who did not 
live at the time, and in the heart of the scene, to 
feel, or almost to understand the impression made 
by the new luminary, or the anxieties with which 
its motions were observed." Lord Brougham's 
account of the matter is no less emphatic. " The 
success was far beyond any of our expectations. It 
was so great that Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded, 
for he had predicted for our journal the fate of the 
original Edinburgh Bevieio, which, born in 1755, 
died in 1756, having produced only two num- 
bers ! The truth is, the most sanguine among us, 
even Smith himself, could not have foreseen the 
greatness of the first triumph, any more than we 
could have imagined the long and successful career 
the Review was afterwards to run, or the vast re- 
forms and improvements in all our institutions, 
social as well as political, it was destined to effect." 

The subscription list of the Review grew within 
six years from 1750 to 9000 j and by 1813 it num- 



44 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

bered more than 12,000. The importance of these 
figures will be better understood when the reader 
recollects that in 1816 the London Times sold only 
8000 copies daily. Moreover, it should be remem- 
bered that one copy of a magazine went much 
further then than it goes now, and did service in 
more than a single household. In 1809 Jeffrey 
boasted that the Revieio was read by 50,000 think- 
ing people within a month after it was printed; 
doubtless this was a perfectly sound estimate. 

Various causes have been suggested as contribut- 
ing to the instant and phenomenal success of the 
Revieio, — the puzzling anonymity of its articles, 
its magisterial tone, the audacity of its attacks, 
what Horner calls its "scurrility," the novelty of 
its Scotch origin. All these causes doubtless had 
their influence. More important still, however, 
were the wit, the knowledge, and the originality of 
the brilliant contributors that Jeffrey rallied round 
him. Writing to his brother in July, 1803, Jef- 
frey thus describes his fellow-workers : " I do not 
.think you know any of my associates. There is 
the sage Horner, however, whom you have seen, 
and who has gone to the English bar with the reso- 
lution of being Lord Chancellor; Brougham, a 
great mathematician, who has just published a 
book upon the Colonial Policy of Europe, which 
all you Americans should read; Eev. Sydney 
Smith and P. Elmsley, two Oxonian priests, full 
of jokes and erudition ; my excellent little Sanscrit 



PRANCIS JEFFREY 45 

Hamilton, who is also in the hands of Bonaparte 
at Eontaineblean ; Thomas Thomson and John 
Murray, two ingenious advocates; and some dozen 
of occasional contributors, among whom the most 
illustrious, I think, are young Watt of Birming- 
ham and Davy of the Eoyal Institution." ^ Many 
of these names are now forgotten, but those of 
Sydney Smith, Brougham,. Horner, and Davy speak 
for themselves and are guarantees of brilliancy 
of style, originality of treatment, and vigorous 
thought. 

The editor and the contributors, then, must re- 
ceive their full share of credit for the success of the 
new Review ; but their ability alone can hardly ac- 
count for a success that converted the "blue and 
yellow " into a national institution. To explain a 
success so permanent and far-reaching, we must 
look beyond editor and contributors and consider 
the relation of the Eevieiv to its social environ- 
ment. The Edinburgh Revieio came into being in 
answer to a popular need; it developed a new lit- 
erary form to meet this need ; and its business ar- 
rangements were such as enabled the cleverest and 
most suggestive writers to adapt their work to the 
requirements of the reading public more readily 
and more effectively than ever before. The mean- 
ing of these assertions will grow clearer as we con- 
sider the difference between the Edinburgh Revieio 
and earlier English Ee views. 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey^ II, 64. 



46 FRANCIS JEFFREY 



Prior to 1802 there were two standard Eeviews 
in Great Britain, — the Monthly Review and the 
Critical Review. Minor Eeviews there had been in 
plenty, of longer or shorter life; but these two 
periodicals had pushed beyond their competitors 
and were regarded as the best of their kind. The 
Monthly Review had been founded in 1749 by Ealph 
Griffiths, a bookseller; it was Whig in politics and 
Low Church in religion. Its rival, the Critical 
Review y of which Smollett was for many years 
editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory 
and High Church. These Eeviews were alike in 
form and in ostensible aim; they were published 
monthly, were made up of unsigned articles of 
moderate length, and professed to give competent 
accounts of the qualities of all new books. But 
though thus apparently worthy predecessors of the 
great Eeviews with which nineteenth-century 
readers are familiar, they were really quite unlike 
them in general policy, in scope and style, and in 
influence. They were merely booksellers' organs, 
under the strict supervision of booksellers, and 
often edited by booksellers. They were used per- 
sistently and systematically, though, of course, 
discreetly, to further the bookseller's business 
schemes, to quicken the sale in case of a slow 
market, and to damage the publications of rivals. 
They were written for the most part by drudges 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 47 

and penny-a-liners, who worked under the orders 
of the bookseller like slaves under the lash of the 
slave-driver. These characteristics of the older 
Keviews may be best illustrated by a brief account 
of the methods in accordance with which Griffiths, 
the editor of the Montlily, conducted his Review, 
and by some choice anecdotes of his treatment of 
subordinates. 

Griffiths was originally a bookseller ; and, though 
he was able later to retire from this business and 
to devote himself wholly to the management of his 
Review, he retained still the instincts of a petty 
tradesman, and kept his eye on the state of the 
market like a skilful seller of perishable wares. 
Of scholarship, of genuine taste, and literary 
ability he had next to nothing; but he had shrewd 
common sense, sound business instincts, tact in 
dealing with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as 
might be needful, and unlimited patience in schem- 
ing for the commercial success of his venture. 

His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 
1765, and with William Taylor of Norwich be- 
tween 1790 and 1800, illustrate his narrow policy 
in the conduct of the Monthly and his tyranny 
towards contributors. Goldsmith, he by turns bul- 
lied and bribed according as poor Goldsmith was 
more or less in need of money. On one occasion 
he became Goldsmith's security with his tailor 
for a new suit of clothes on condition that Gold- 
smith at once write four articles for the Review; 



48 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

these articles were turned out to order, and ap- 
peared in December, 1758. On Goldsmith's fail- 
ing to pay his tailor's bill in the specified time, 
Griffiths demanded the return of the suit and also 
of the books ; and when he found that Goldsmith 
had pawned the books, he wrote him abusively, 
terming him sharper and villain, and threatening 
him with jail. In 1759, on the appearance of Gold- 
smith's first book, Griffiths ordered one of his 
hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, 
and to make a personal attack on the author. 
These orders were faithfully carried out in the next 
number of the Monthly Review.^ 

With William Taylor of jSTorwich Griffiths took 
a very different tone. Taylor was one of the few 
men of breeding and of parts who, before 1802, 
condescended to write for Keviews, and he was 
moreover for many years the great English au- 
thority on German literature. For these reasons, 
Griffiths always used him with the utmost tender- 
ness, and, even when giving him orders or refusing 
his articles, took a flattering tone of deference and 
admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an 
increase of pay; Griffiths's answer gives a very 
instructive glimpse of the relations between the 
bookseller-editor and his hack-writers. The 
" gratuity " for review work, Griffiths assures Tay- 
lor, had been settled fifty years before at two 
guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, " a sum 

1 Forster's Goldsmith (ed. London, 1848), p. 170. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 49 

not then deemed altogether puny," and in the case 
of most writers had since remained unchanged, 
although there had been certain "allowed excep- 
tions in favour of the most difficult branches of the 
business." These exceptions, however, had tended 
to cause much jealousy and heart-burning among 
the contributors; for "it could not be expected 
that those labourers in the vineyard, who cus- 
tomarily executed the less difficult branches of the 
culture, would ever be cordially convinced that 
their merits and importance were inferior to any." 
After these laborious explanations Griffiths agrees 
to raise Taylor's compensation to three guineas per 
sheet of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly 
points out that by so doing he risks "exciting 
jealousy in the corps, similar, perhaps, to what 
happened among the vine-dressers. Matt., chap. 
XX." " If objections arise," he shrewdly continues, 
"we must resort for consolation to a list of can- 
didates for the next vacancy, for in the literary 
harvest there is never any want of reapers."^ 
Griffiths 's slave-driving propensities show clearly 
through the thin disguise of politic words. Plainly 
he feels himself absolute master of the minds and 
wills of an indefinite number of penny-a-liners; 
and it is on these penny-a-liners that he resolves 
to depend for the great mass of his articles. 

The evil influence of the publisher's despotism 
ran through the Review and vitiated all its judg- 

1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 130-132. 



50 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

merits. The editor-publisher prescribed to his 
hacks what treatment a book should receive. 
Sometimes this was with a view to the market. 
"I send also the HorcB Bibilicce at a venture," 
writes Griffiths to Taylor, "... it signifies not 
much whether we notice it or not, as it is not on 
sale.'^^ The italics are Griffiths's own. Some- 
times, the publisher-editor merely wanted to 
favour a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths 's 
dictation in the case of Goldsmith's first book 
has already been noted. On another occasion 
Griffiths sent a copy of Murphy's Tacitus to Tay- 
lor with the following significant suggestion: 
"One thing I have to mention, entre nous, that 
Mr. M. is one of us, and that it is a rule in our 
society for the members to behave with due de- 
corum toward each other, whenever they appear at 
their own bar as authors, out of their own critical 
province. If a kingdom (like poor France at 
present) be divided against itself, 'how shall that 
kingdom stand '?"^ If Griffiths ventured on this 
dictation with a man of Taylor's standing and in- 
dependence, his tyranny over his regular depend- 
ents must have been complete and relentless. 

As a result, review-writing became purely hack- 
work. The reviewer had no voice of his own in 
his criticism; what little individuality he might, 
in his feebleness, have put into his work, had he 

1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 139. 

2 7&id., I, 122. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 51 

been left to himself, disappeared under the eye 
of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine, 
praising and blaming perfunctorily and conven- 
tionally, at the bidding of the editor-publisher. 
Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the 
staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of 
work did the critic rise above the dead level of 
hopeless mediocrity. 

A final result of this whole system of review- 
managing and hack-writing was unwillingness on 
the part of men of position to have anything to do 
with review-writing. If a man criticised books in 
a Eeview, he felt that he was putting himself on a 
level with Kenrick, Griffiths's notorious hireling, 
who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, 
who had bound himself to a bookseller for ninety- 
nine years, and with other like wretches. William 
Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen 
who, before 1802, ventured to write for Eeviews. 
/ With the establishment of the Edinburgh Review 
all this was changed. The prime principle of the 
new Review was independence of booksellers. The 
plan was not a bookseller's scheme, but was 
the outcome of the ambitious fervour of half a 
dozen young adventurers in law, literature, and 
politics. From the start the bookseller was a 
"mere instrument," as Brougham specially notes. 
The management of the Review was at first in the 
hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for 
London his last words to the publisher. Constable, 



52 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

were, "If you will give £200 per annum to your 
editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have 
the best Eeview in Europe." Accordingly, the 
editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, at even a 
higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had 
named. Jeffrey hesitated because of " the risk of 
general degradation." But he found the £300 "a 
monstrous bribe"; moreover, the other contribu- 
tors were all planning to take their ten guineas a 
sheet ; accordingly, after many qualms, he swal- 
lowed his scruples and became a paid editor. 
"The publication," he wrote to his brother, in 
July, 1803, "is in the highest degree respectable 
as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected 
with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary book- 
seller's journal, I have done with it." 
(/ So began Jeffrey's "reign" of twenty-six years; 
and so ended the despotism of booksellers. Hence- 
forth the editor, not the publisher, was master. 
It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be 
handled, or rather what subjects should be dis- 
cussed ; it was Jeffrey who determined the price to 
be paid for each article, — "I had," he declares, 
" an unlimited discretion in this respect " ; it was 
Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified 
the refractory, and reached out here and there after 
new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who 
shaped the policy of the Bevieiu and impressed on 
x^ it its distinctive character. 

^ But there were several other hardly less important 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 53 

points in which the business policy of the Edinburgh 
was a new departure. The pay for reviewing was 
greatly increased. The old price had been two 
guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages ; the Edin- 
burgh Review, after the first three numbers, paid ten 
guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. 
Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two- 
thirds of the articles were, according to Jeffrey, 
"paid much higher, averaging from twenty to 
twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number." 

Again, every contributor was forced to take pay ; 
no contributor, however nice his honour, was suf- 
fered to refuse. This regulation was of the ut- 
most importance; the rule salved the consciences 
of many brilliant young professional men, who were 
glad of pay, but ashamed to write for it, and afraid 
of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey's 
clever arrangement they could write for fame or 
for simple amusement, and then have money 
"thrust upon them." With high prices and en- 
forced compensation the new Review at once drew 
into its service men of a totally different stamp 
from the old hack-writers. 

Finally, the Edinburgh was published quarterly, 
whereas the old Eeviews were published monthly. 
This change was for two reasons important: in the 
first place, writers had more time in which to pre- 
pare their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth 
life intellectually; and, in the second place, the 
Revieiv made no attempt to notice all publications, 



54 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 



and chose for discussion only books of real signifi- 
cance. Coleridge particularly commends this part 
of the policy of the Review : " It has a claim upon 
the gratitude of the literary republic, and, indeed, 
of the reading public at large, for having origi- 
nated the scheme of reviewing those books only, 
which are susceptible and deserving of argumenta- 
tive criticism."^ 

VI 

These, then, were the principal points in which 
the organization and policy of the Edinburgh Me- 
vieiu contrasted with those of its predecessors ; and 
the influence of these changes on the tone and 
spirit of the articles in the new Review can hardly 
be exaggerated. The Edinburgh Review was not 
a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ 
of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which 
the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual 
stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. 
The Review had opinions of its own on all public 
questions. In politics, it advocated the principles 
of the Constitutional AVhigs, at first in a non- 
partisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggres- 
sively ; it pleaded for reform of the representation, 
for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition 
of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for 
judicious measures to allay this discontent without 
violent Constitutional changes. In social matters, 

1 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria., chap. 21. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 55 

it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the 
game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the pro- 
tection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfort- 
unates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In 
education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridi- 
culed the narrowness of university ideals, and 
contended for the adoption of practical methods 
and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it 
criticised the existing order of things, always brill- 
iantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely 
and radically, and stirred the public into a keener 
consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of 
the questions of the hour, social, political, and 
religious. 

Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, 
writers would find it necessary to go far outside of 
the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their 
articles express their own independent ideas on 
various important topics, rather than simply their 
critical opinions of the merits of new publications. 
And this is precisely what happened. A book- 
review became in most cases merely a mask for the 
writer's own ideas on some burning question of the 
hour. In other words, the establishment of the Ed- 
inburgh Review really led to the evolution of a new 
literary form ; the old-fashioned review-article was 
converted into a brief argumentative essay discuss- 
ing some living topic, political or social, in the 
light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay 
had been unknown in the eighteenth century, and 



56 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

was developed at the opening of the nineteenth 
century in response to the needs of the moment. 

Nor was this change in the nature of the review- 
article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, 
and with his usual sourness protested against it. 
"If [the critic] recurs," he says, "to the stipulated 
subject in the end, it is not till after he has ex- 
hausted his budget of general knowledge; and he 
establishes his own claims first in an elaborate 
inaugural dissertation de omni scihili et quibusdam 
aliis, before he deigns to bring forward the preten- 
sions of the original candidate for praise, who is 
only the second figure in the piece. We may 
sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no al- 
lusion whatever is made to the work under sentence 
of death, after the first announcement of the title- 
page."^ Coleridge, on the other hand, approved 
of the change, and commended the "plan of sup- 
plying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity 
wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own 
weight, with original essays on the most interest- 
ing subjects of the time, religious or political ; in 
which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed 
furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisi- 
tion."^ The reviewers themselves recognized, of 
course, the change they were working, though they 
did not altogether realize its significance. In 
1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, " Have you any good 

1 Hazlitt's Table Talk, 2d series, essay 6. 

2 Coleridge's Biograpliia Literaria^ chap. 21. ^ 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 57 

subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are 
two I wish you, yourself, would undertake, if you 
can pick up books that would admit of them."^ 
This quotation illustrates the fact that the impor- 
tant question in the minds of the reviewers was 
always, not "What new books have appeared?" 
but "What topics just now have the greatest 
actuality and are best worth discussing? " 

This, then, was largely the cause of the success 
of the Bevieiv: it offered, in its articles, a literary 
form by means of which the most active and origi- 
nal minds could at once come into communication 
with " the intelligent public ^' on all vital topics ; 
it made the best thought and the newest knowledge 
more readily available than ever before for readers 
who were every day becoming more alive to their 
value. 

The times were plainly favourable. The French 
Eevolution had stirred men's imaginations as they 
had not been stirred for a century, and had shaken 
portentously in all directions the foundations of 
belief. Traditions in politics, in social organiza- 
tion, in religion, were violently assailed by men 
like Godwin, Home Tooke, and Holcroft, and 
loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. 
The fever of Komanticism was already making 
itself felt and was quickening men's hearts to new 
passions and firing their imaginations with new 
visions of possible bliss. The air was full of 

1 Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, I, 419. 



58 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

questions and doubts, of eager forecasts,, and of 
ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and 
feeling demanded freer utterance than could be 
found through old literary forms and with old 
methods of publication. 

Moreover, the increasing importance of the 
middle class and the spread of popular education 
were favourable to the development of the new 
literary form. The number of men who read and 
thought for themselves had been rapidly growing. 
These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and 
had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They 
were overworked professional men or business 
men, who were alive to the questions of the hour, 
who had thought over them and discussed them 
wherever and whenever they could, and who were 
anxious for guidance from " men of light and lead- 
ing." The essays of the new Review gave them 
just what they wanted, — brief, clear, yet original 
and suggestive, dissertations by the best-trained 
minds on the most important current topics. 

These, then, are some of the causes, over and 
beyond Jeffrey's editorial skill, and the brilliancy 
and originality of his co-workers, that led to the 
unprecedented success of the Edinburgh Review. 
Their importance and their significance are shown 
by the fact that within a few years several other 
Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan 
with the Edinburgh, and soon rivalled it in popu- 
lar favour. In 1809 the Tory Quarterly Review was 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 59 

started with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, 
Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its 
contributors. In 1820 the Retrospective Review was 
established, and in 1824 the Westminster Review, 
the organ of the Eadicals ; Bentham was its patron, 
Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John 
Stuart Mill were constant contributors. These 
Eeviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of 
their organization were modelled after the famous 
Ediiiburgh. They all found a ready welcome, and, 
with the exception of the Retrospective, have con- 
tinued to thrive down to our own day. 

VII 

The bearing of all this upon the history of Jef- 
frey's literary reputation must be fairly obvious. 
Jeffrey profited from the conspiracy of a great 
many fortunate circumstances, and for a series of 
years enjoyed, as dictator of the policy of the 
Edinburgh Review, a reputation as critic that was' 
really far beyond what his intrinsic merit justified. 
Leigh Hunt and Lamb were much more delicate 
and imaginative appreciators of literature than 
Jeffrey; Hazlitt, despite his waywardness and 
arrogance, was a subtler and more stimulating lit- 
erary interpreter. Coleridge was incomparably 
Jeffrey's superior in penetrating insight, in learn- 
ing and scholarship, in philosophic scope, and in 
refinement and sureness of taste. Yet Jeffrey, 



60 FRANCIS JEFFREY 

by dint of his cleverness, versatility, brilliancy, 
readiness of resource, and, above all, because of 
his commanding position as the director of the new 
Whig Review, outstripped all these competitors 
and imposed himself on public opinion as the typi- 
cally infallible critic of his day and generation. 
His personal charm, too, worked in his favour ; his 
Whig following was enthusiastically loyal. Every- 
thing tended to increase, for the time being, his 
fame as a literary autocrat. 

The later reaction, which has so nearly con- 
signed Jeffrey to the region of unread authors, was 
in its turn extreme, and yet followed naturally. 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Jeffrey had as- 
sailed persistently till he had become in the public 
mind the representative foe of Eomanticism, had 
won their cause, and been received by wider and 
wider circles of the most cultivated and discerning 
readers as among the foremost poets of their age. 
Jeffrey, their arch-enemy, suffered correspondingly 
in public esteem. Time seemed to have proved 
him wrong in one of his most strenuously asserted 
prejudices. Moreover, this particular defeat was 
merely one special instance of the evil effect that 
far-reaching influences were having upon Jeffrey's 
reputation. His modes of conceiving life were 
being outgrown. His genial, man-of-the-world 
wisdom and somewhat narrow range of feeling 
seemed more and more unsatisfactory, as the pub- 
lic gradually made their own the deeper spiritual 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 61 

experience of idealistic poets, like Shelley, and 
of transcendental prose-writers, like Carlyle. Jef- 
frey's dry intellectuality and his shallow asso- 
ciational psychology seemed unequal to the yital 
problems in art and in ethics that the new age was 
canvassing. Moreover, his autocratic style and 
omniscient air had been caught up by all the quar- 
terly Eeviews, and no longer served to distinguish 
him; the methods and the tone of the Edinburgh 
were copied far and wide, and the critics of the 
new generation were quite a match for Jeffrey in 
gay, domineering assurance and in easy, swift om- 
niscience. Jeffrey had trained many followers 
into his own likeness ; or, at any rate, the methods 
and the tone that he had hit upon " survived " and 
had been universally received as fit. 

Finally, Jeffrey's essays, even at their best, had 
many of the qualities of " occasional " writing, and 
too often seemed merely meant for the moment; 
the trail of the periodical was over them all. 
Their very rapidity, sparkle, and plausibility gave 
them an air of perishableness ; they seemed clever 
and entertaining improvisations. Work of this 
sort could hardly hope to maintain itself perma- 
nently in public favour. Nor was the collection of 
his essays, that Jeffrey saw fit to publish in 1843, 
of a sort to make a stand against the general in- 
difference that was clouding his fame. Two thou- 
sand pages of improvised comments on all manner 
of topics, from the Memoirs of Baher to Dugald 



62 FRANCIS JP:FFREY 

Stewart's Philosophical Essays, could scarcely be 
expected to secure a fixed place for themselves in 
the affections of large masses of readers. A far 
smaller volume, that should have included only 
the essays, or portions of essays, that were best 
wrought in style, most vigorously thought out, and 
contained the most characteristic and final of Jef- 
frey's opinions, would have been more likely — ex- 
cept in so far as Jeffrey based his claims on his 
versatility — to have insured him permanent re- 
membrance as critic and prose-writer. 

The reaction, then, against Jeffrey was necessary 
and, in some degree, just. Yet, now that the air 
is cleared of Eomantic prejudices, Jeffrey's real 
services to the causes both of criticism and of sound 
literature may be more accurately perceived and 
defined. Not for a moment can the student who 
aims at genuine insight into the history of litera- 
ture and of literary opinion during the first quarter 
of our century afford to disregard Jeffrey and his 
Edinburgh Review Essays, or to pass him by with 
a phrase as a mere unsuccessful opponent of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge. Jeffrey influenced 
public opinion decisively and beneficially on a vast 
range of subjects. He broadened the methods of 
literary criticism and won for it new points of 
view and new fields. He put the relations be- 
tween critic and public on a sounder basis, and 
raised the profession of literary criticism into an 
honourable calling. Finally, he developed English 



FRANCIS JEFFREY 63 

style, added to its swiftness of play and brilliant 
serviceableness, and prepared the way for the 
dazzlingly effective, if somewhat mechanical, tech- 
nique of Macaulay. All these good works are 
nowadays too often forgotten ; and on the injustice 
of such neglect one cannot comment more aptly 
than through the quotation of Jeffrey's own 
famous phrase — "This will never do.'' 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 



In these ^'imcanonical times," it may seem 
somewhat grotesque to go for information about 
an author's style to his patron saint. Yet no 
surer way exists for gaining an insight into the 
peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman's writings 
than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the 
founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom 
Newman chose for his "own special Father and 
Patron." In at least two of his discourses, or es- 
says, Newman has analyzed the character and pe- 
culiar influence of St. Philip Neri. "Whatever 
was exact and systematic," Newman tells us, 
"pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule 
and authoritative speech, as David refused the 
armour of his king. No ; he would be but an ordi- 
nary individual priest as others ; and his weapons 
should be but unaffected humility and unpretend- 
ing love. All he did was to be done by the light, 
and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his per- 
sonal character and his easy conversation." In 
another essay, Newman describes St. Philip's dis- 
trust of " the severity of the Regular " as a means 
G4 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER Q^ 

for the control of those whom he sought to sub- 
jugate. "Influence," adroit intimacy, winning 
intercourse, these were the means by which St. 
Philip preferred to work on those about him. 

Newman's loving regard for these traits of St. 
Philip's genius is a revelation of some of the deep- 
est instincts of his nature, — instincts which must 
at once be brought into view in any attempt to ap- 
preciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar 
personal charm is impressed on all the most char- 
acteristic of Newman's prose-writings, — on what- 
ever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found 
himself and realized his essential genius. Ab- 
stract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour 
of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly 
discourse. Every one knows what charm there is 
in the talk of a man of the world who puts before 
his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable 
incidents of actual life as he himself has encoun- 
tered them. The whim, the. personal idiom, the 
glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious 
disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand 
with glowing human experience, give to talk of 
this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the 
style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial 
rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has, 
also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to es- 
cape from the blank region of authorship, to realize 
himself before the reader as a friendly face and 
form, and to communicate himself through the 



66 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and 
gesture and smile that give to actual human inter- 
course its delight and stimulating power. The ex- 
treme form of this colloquial style, where^an author 
is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in 
Newman's writings; Newman's temper was, after 
all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too 
abstract and difficult. Earely, however, have 
topics as speculative as are many of Newman's 
been treated with so much of the wayward charm 
and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman 
reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, 
the affability, the winning adroitness, even the 
half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of 
a man of the world with his fellows. 

Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that 
gives to Newman's discussions of abstract topics 
their peculiar distinction; it is rather his recon- 
ciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with 
the demands of logical method and thoroughness 
of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually 
easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman's 
style and method is that, with all their apparent 
casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and 
essentially logical command of the topic under dis- 
cussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute 
master of the severe beauty of rational discourse, 

— of the beauty of that kind of discourse that dis- 
dains to follow any associations save those of logic, 

— discusses with fine economic precision just the 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 67 

aspects of truth that right reason detects as essen- 
tial to the question in hand, and is everywhere 
formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His 
earliest work is often austerely wrought in accord- 
ance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the 
essential charm that made him so winning in per- 
sonal intercourse passed over into his prose, and 
conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and 
colour of life. Yet this change involved no real 
sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the text- 
ure of his thought. And for the trained student of 
literary method much of the surpassing charm of 
Newman's work is due to the possibility of finding 
in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of 
logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and 
charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This 
victory is so easily won as to seem something by 
the way; but the student and analyst knows that 
it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined in- 
stinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, 
and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of 
thought. 

The very perfection of Newman's rhetorical man- 
ner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges 
of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst 
of a people like the English, who are perhaps some- 
what affectedly straightforward and pretentiously 
downright, Newman should, now and then, have 
suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, 
impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpret 



68 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 

subtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and 
indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice 
of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon 
Kingsley's famous attack upon Newman. He had 
an instinctive dislike of Newman's sinuousness and 
suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very 
carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman's 
whole work as containing a special variety of eccle- 
siastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more 
plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a 
certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose 
cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty ob- 
servers, be confused with Newman's bearing and 
style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the 
unfairness of Kingsley's charges become plain 
after a moment's analysis. 

In spite of Newman's ease and affability, a fair- 
minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when 
he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of 
uncompromising strength and unwavering convic- 
tion. He is sure that the author is really revealing 
himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding 
his apparent self-effacement, and that he is impos- 
ing his own conclusions, persuasively and con- 
strainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, 
however adroitly Newman may be developing his 
thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of 
his readers' prejudices, he would at any moment 
give a point-blank answer to a point-blank ques- 
tion. There is never any real doubt of Newman's 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 69 

courage and manly English temper, or of his readi- 
ness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of 
debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamen- 
tal sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but un- 
obtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman's 
style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity 
of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his 
unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap 
suavity or unctuousness. 

But JSTewman's adroitness and rhetorical skill 
have exposed him to charges of still another kind, 
charges that concern the very substance of his 
thought and intellectual life, and charges that have 
been urged with much greater dialectical skill than 
Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general 
examination of Newman's theories, Mr. E. A. 
Abbott ^ has accused him of systematically doctor- 
ing truth, and of having elaborated, though per- 
haps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for 
inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance 
of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. 
Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of 
Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of 
Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman 
consciously palters with truth, or tries to make 
the worse appear the better reason. But he urges 
that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other 
things than of truth, that he desired, with an over- 
mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, 

/ ^ Fhilomythus, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891. 



70 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 

and that lie persuaded himself of their correctness 
by a series of manoeuvres which really involved 
insincere logic. 

Here, again, the charges that are made against 
Newman seem the result of prejudice and tempera- 
mental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. 
Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian in- 
tellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for 
whom the only truth that exists is truth that can 
be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to 
comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman's 
mental constitution and his resulting methods of 
conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. 
Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much 
more elusive susbtance, than it is to the positivist, 
to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in fig- 
ures ; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills 
are packed into a box ; it cannot be conveyed into 
the human system with the simple directness which 
the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching 
his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly 
inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, lan- 
guage is an infinitely treacherous medium; words 
are so "false," so capable of endless change, that 
one is "loath to prove reason with them." Eead- 
ers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to count- 
less other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because 
of such considerations as these, Newman is con- 
tinually studious of effect in his writings ; he is in- 
tensely conscious of his audience ; and he is always 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 71 

striving to win a way for his convictions, and aim- 
ing to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of 
his hearers by gently persuasive means. 

But all this by no means implies any real care- 
lessness of truth on Newman's part, or any sacri- 
fice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of 
attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more 
strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it 
out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it 
in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive 
as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible 
and describable and defensible ; something, further- 
more, of the acquisition of which Newman can give 
a very definite account; something as far as possible 
from mere misty sentiment, and something, further- 
more, to be strenuously asserted and defended. 

Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, 
then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integ- 
rity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even 
in those passages or in those works where the 
search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the 
desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, 
or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the 
author most indirectly and tortuously towards his 
end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and 
frank readiness to give an account of himself that 
prevent Newman's prevailing subtlety, adroitness, 
and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprej- 
udiced reader any impression of timorousness or 
disingenuousness. 



72 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WKITER 



II 

In what has been said of Newman's realization 
of the elusive nature of truth and of the great diffi- 
culty of securing a welcome for it in the minds and 
hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is 
most distinctive in his methods. He was a great 
rhetorician, and whatever he produced shows evi- 
dence, on analysis, of having been constructed with 
the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of 
hand. He himself frankly admitted his rhetorical 
bent. Writing to Hurrell Fronde in 1836, about 
the management of the Tractarian agitation, he 
says, " You and Keble are the philosophers, and I 
the rhetorician." ^ And in a somewhat earlier let- 
ter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even 
stronger terms : " I have a vivid perception of the 
consequences of certain admitted principles, have 
a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing 
them out, have the refinement to admire them, and 
a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them." "^ 

This rhetorical skill was partly natural and in- 
stinctive, and partly the result of training. From 
his earliest years as a student, Newman had been 
conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his 
intelligence, for his readiness in assuming for 
speculative purposes the most diverse points of 

1 Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, 1891, II, 156. 

2 Ibid., I, 416. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 73 

viewj and for his insight into temperaments and 
his comprehension of their modifying action on the 
white light of truth. With this admirable equip- 
ment for effective rhetorical work, he came directly 
under the influence, in Oriel College, of two excep- 
tionally great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for 
many years Provost of Oriel, and Whately, one of 
its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a 
famous controversialist and dialectician, who had 
long been regarded as the chief champion of the 
University against the attacks of outsiders. His 
Advice to a Young Bevieiver with a Specimen of the 
Art (1807), had turned into ridicule the airs and 
pretensions of the young Edinburgh reviewers and 
had led them into severe strictures on Univer- 
sity methods, against which attacks, however. Dr. 
Copleston had vigorously defended Oxford in vari- 
ous publications, to the satisfaction of all Univer- 
sity men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the 
first year of Newman's residence there, and sug- 
gestions of the influence of his ideas and methods 
are to be found throughout the early pages of the 
Apologia and the Autobiographical Memoir. Still 
more decisive, however, was the influence of a 
yet more famous rhetorician. Dr. Whately, whose 
lectures on logic and on rhetoric remained almost 
down to the present day standard text-books in 
those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a 
controversialist, and his Historic Doubts relative to 
Napoleon Buonaparte was perhaps the cleverest and 



74 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WHITEli 

most famous piece of ironical argumentation pro- 
duced in England during the first quarter of the 
century. Newman, for several of his most impres- 
sionable years, was intimately associated with 
Whately. "He emphatically opened my mind,'' 
Newman says in the Apologia, " and taught me to 
think and to use my reason^" Under the influence 
of these two masters of rhetoric and redoubtable 
controversialists Newman's natural aptitude for 
rhetorical methods was encouraged and fostered, so 
that he became a perfect adept in all the arts of 
exposition and argumentation and persuasion. 

Whatever work of Newman's, then, we take up, 
we may be sure that its construction will repay 
careful analysis. In trying to present any set of 
truths, Newman was consciously confronting a 
delicate psychological problem; he was aware of 
the elements that entered into the problem; he 
knew what special difficulties he had to face because 
of the special nature of the truth he was dealing 
with, — its abstractness, or complexity, or novelty. 
He had measured, also, the precise degree of re- 
sistance he must expect because of the peculiar 
prejudices or preoccupations of his readers. And 
the shape which his discussion finally took — the 
particular methods that he followed — were the 
result of a deliberate adapt?.tion of means to ends ; 
they were the methods that his trained rhetorical 
instinct and his insight into the truth he was 
handling and into the temperaments and intelli- 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 75 

gences he was to address himself to dictated as 
most likely to persuade. 

Although ordinarily Newman does not explain 
the method he follows or comment on the difficul- 
ties of his problem, he has, in his Apologia, de- 
parted from this rule, and taken his readers into 
his confidence. In the first thirty pages of this 
self-justificatory piece of writing, he sets forth 
minutely the prejudices against which he must 
make his way, considers various possible modes 
of overcoming these prejudices, notes the precise 
reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he 
chooses, and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate 
design that underlies and controls the seeming 
desultoriness of his whole discussion. 

The problem which in this case confronted New- 
man was briefly as follows. He had been charged 
by Kingsley with teaching "lying on system." 
He had protested against the charge and had ob- 
tained a half-hearted apology. Later, however, the 
charge had been reiterated more formally, and with 
the added taunt that as Newman recommended sys- 
tematic dissimulation no one could be expected to 
accept his self-exculpating word. These charges 
fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the gen- 
eral trend of British prejudice against Eoman 
Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular prej- 
udice against Newman himself that sprang from 
his early attempts to make the Anglican Church 
more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to 



76 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 

Eome. How, then, was Newman to i^ersuade the 
public of Kingsley's injustice and his own inno- 
cence? He saw at once that to deal with each 
separate charge would be mere waste of time; to 
prove that in a special case he had not lied or 
recommended lying would carry him no whit to- 
wards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust re- 
mained the dominant mood of the British mind 
towards himself and his party. First of all, he 
must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the 
presumption against him, and win for his cause at 
least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded to 
the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been 
hitherto clean; then he might hope to secure for 
his particular denials a universal scope. The 
method that he chose in order to win his readers 
was admirably conceived. He would put himself 
vitally and almost dramatically before them; he 
would bring them within the actual sound of his 
voice and the glance of his eye ; he would let them 
follow him through the long course of his years as 
student, tutor, preacher, and leader, and come to 
know him as intimately as those few friends had 
known him with whom he had lived most freely. 
Then, he would ask his readers, when he had put 
his personality before them in its many shifting, 
but continuous aspects, and with all the intense 
persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether 
they were ready to believe of the man they had 
thus watched through the round of his duties that 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITEB 77 

he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which New- 
man could count on exerting in thus appealing to 
his personal charm he was, of course, unable to 
speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was 
having recourse to an inflaence which had always 
been potent whenever it had had a chance to make 
itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was 
true of his relations to others that ^'friends un- 
asked, unhoped " had " come, " — all men who met 
him falling almost inevitably under the sway of his 
winning and commanding personality. Newman 
was, therefore, well advised when he resolved to 
reveal himself to the world and to trust to the con- 
ciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for 
his specific denial of Kingsley's charges. 

In accordance with this purpose and plan, the 
Apologia pro Vita Sua, or History of his Eeligious 
Opinions, was written; and for these reasons his 
answer to certain definite charges of equivocation 
and systematic and elaborate misrepresentation 
was so shaped as to include in its scope the 
story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of 
the original edition of the Ap)ologia, only the 
last 93 pages are devoted to the actual refutation 
of Kingsley's charges; the 238 pages that precede 
are merely persuasive, and simply prepare the 
way for the final defence. Probably in no other 
piece of writing is the actual demonstration so 
curiously small in proportion to the means that are 
taken to make the logic effective. Of course, it 



78 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

may be urged in reply to this view of the construc- 
tion of the Apologia, that to look at the book as 
purely a reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an 
arbitrary and artificial point of view, and hence to 
distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of pro- 
portion; that the real aim of the book was simply 
and sincerely autobiographic, and that, regarding 
the book as frank autobiography, the critic need 
find nothing strange in the proportioning of its 
parts. In answer to this objection, it should be 
noted that the last pages of the book deal directly 
and argumentatively with " Mr. Kingsley's accusa- 
tions " ; that the transition in Part YII. from the 
history of Newman's opinions to the discussion of 
the theory of truth -telling is almost imperceptible ; 
and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in 
the early pages of the book that the sole reason for 
his self-revelations is his wish to clear away mis- 
conceptions, to win once again the confidence of 
that English public that had long been distrustful 
of him, and to make widely effective his refutation 
of Kingsley's charges. The book, then, is fairly 
to be described as an enormously elaborate and in- 
genious piece of special pleading to prepare the 
way for a few syllogisms that have now become 
grotesquely insignificant. 

It has been worth while to lay great stress on 
this disproportion between persuasion and demon- 
stration in the Apologia, because this disproportion 
illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of carica- 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 79 

tiire, certain of Newman's fundamental beliefs and 
resulting tricks of method. First and foremost, it 
illustrates the slight esteem in which he held the 
formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demon- 
strations. Not that he failed to recognize the 
value of analysis and logical demonstration as 
verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subor- 
dinated these processes to those by which truth is 
originally won, and to those also by which truth 
is persuasively inculcated. 

In a sermon on Implicit and Explicit Reason, he 
distinguishes with great elaborateness between the 
method by which the mind makes its way almost 
intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set 
of truths, and the subsequent analysis by which 
it takes account of this half-instinctive original 
process and renders the moments of the process 
self-conscious and articulate. His description of 
the intellect delicately and swiftly feeling its way 
towards truth may well be quoted entire: "The 
mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and ad- 
vances forward with a quickness which has become 
a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which 
baffle investigation. It passes on from point to 
point, gaining one by some indication; another on 
a probability; then availing itself of an associa- 
tion; then falling back on some received law; next 
seizing on testimony; then committing itself to 
some popular impression, or some inward instinct, 
or some obscure memory; and thus it makes prog- 



80 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 

ress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, 
by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, 
how, he knows not himself, by personal endow- 
ments and by practice, rather than by rule, leav- 
ing no track behind him, and unable to teach 
another. It is not too much to say that the step- 
ping by which great geniuses scale the mountain 
of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in 
general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up 
a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can 
take; and its justification lies alone in their suc- 
cess. And such mainly is the way in which all 
men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason — not 
by rule, but by an inward faculty. Keasoning, 
then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spon- 
taneous energy within us, not an art." ^ 

But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the 
original process by which truth is attained; it is 
in no way essential to the validity or completeness 
of the process. " Clearness in argument certainly 
is not indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy 
in stating doctrines or principles is not essential to 
feeling and acting upon them. The exercise of 
analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the 
process analyzed. The process of reasoning is 
complete in itself, and independent.'''^ 

Finally, logical demonstration has relatively 
little value as a means of winning a hearing for 

1 Oxford University Sermons, ed. 1887, p. 257. 
2/6M.,p. 259. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 81 

new tnitli, of securing its entrance into the popu- 
lar consciousness, and of giving it a place among 
the determining powers of life. "Logic makes 
but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude ; first shoot 
round corners, and you may not despair of con- 
verting by a syllogism. '^ Men must be inveigled 
into the acceptance of truth ; they cannot be driven 
to accept it at the point of the syllogism. " The 
heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, 
but through the imagination, by means of direct 
impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, 
by history, by description. People influence us, 
voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us." 

The application of all this, — particularly of 
what Newman says touching the persuasiveness of 
a personal appeal, — to the whole method of the 
Apologia hardly needs pointing out. The work 
is, from first to last, intensely personal in its tone 
and matter, persuasive because of its concreteness, 
its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the 
speaker's voice, the sincerity and dignity of his 
look and bearing. Logic, of course, gives coherence 
to the discussions. The processes of thought by 
which Newman moved from point to point in his 
theological development are consistently set forth; 
but the convincing quality of the book comes from 
its embodiment of a life, not from its systematiza- 
tion of a theory. 

In accordance with this general character of the 
book is its tone throughout ; its style is the perf ec- 



82 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

tion of informality and easy colloquialism. Kow 
and then, in describing his ideas on specially com- 
plicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered 
propositions, and proceeds, for the time being, with 
the precaution and precision of the dialectician. 
But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and 
apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas 
as if he were merely emulating Montaigne in con- 
fidential self-revelation, and were guided by no 
controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has sur- 
passed, or even equalled, Newman in combining 
apparent desultoriness of treatment with real defi- 
niteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method. 

Ill 

Another admirable example of Newman's least 
formal, and most characteristic, method may be 
found in his series of papers on the Bise and Prog- 
ress of Universities. Here, again, there is appar- 
ent desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following 
of historical sequence. One after another, with 
what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman de- 
scribes a half-dozen of the most famous universities 
of the past, explains popularly their organization, 
methods, and aims, entertaining the reader mean- 
while with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as 
the description of Attica and Athens, and with 
such dramatic episodes as that of Abelard. Yet 
underneath this apparent caprice runs the control- 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 88 

ling purpose of putting the reader in possession, 
through concrete illustrations, of the complete idea 
of a typically effective university. Each special 
school that Newman describes illustrates some es- 
sential attribute of the ideal school; and inciden- 
tally the reader, who is all the time beguiled, from 
chapter to chapter, by Kewman's picturesque detail, 
takes into his mind the various features, and ulti- 
mately the complete image, of the perfect type. 

In the series of Discourses on the Idea of a Uni- 
versity, Newman's method is more formal and his 
tone more controversial. Newman was this time 
addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was 
treating of a series of abstract topics, on which he 
was called to pronounce in his character of proba- 
ble vice-chancellor of the proposed university. 
Accordingly, throughout these Discourses he is 
consistently academic in tone and manner, and for- 
mal and elaborate in method. He lays out his 
work with somewhat mechanical precision; he 
sketches his plan strictly beforehand; he defines 
terms and refines upon possible meanings, and 
guards at each step against misinterpretations ; he 
pauses often to come to an understanding with his 
hearers about the progress already made, and to 
consider what line of advance severe logical method 
next dictates. In all these ways, he is deliber- 
ate, explicit, and demonstrative. Yet despite this 
strenuous regard for system and method, not even 
here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic or 



84 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

pedantically over-formal; the result of his strenu- 
ousness is, rather, a finely conscientious circum- 
spection of demeanour and an academic dignity of 
bearing. There is something irresistibly impres- 
sive in the perfect poise with which he moves 
through the intricacies of the many abstractions 
that his subject involves. He exhibits each as- 
pect of his subject in just the right perspective and 
with just the requisite minuteness of detail; he 
leads us unerringly from each point of view to that 
which most naturally follows ; he keeps us always 
aware of the relation of each aspect to the total 
sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp ; and 
so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect 
command of an intellectual region, in its concrete 
facts and in its abstract relations, which exposition 
aims to make possible. These Discourses are as 
fine an example as exists in English of the union 
of strict method with charm of style in the treat- 
ment of an abstract topic. 

In the Develo])ment of Christian Doctrine and the 
Grammar of Assent the severity of Newman's 
method is somewhat greater, as is but natural in 
strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these ab- 
stract discussions his style retains an inalienable 
charm, due to the luminousness of the atmosphere, 
the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the 
unobtrusively tropical phrasing, and the steady 
harmonious sweep of the periods. Few books on 
equally abstract topics are as easy reading. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 85 

Newman's methods as a controversialist may 
advantageously be studied in his Present Position 
of Catholics in England, — a work that contains 
some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In 
plan and construction, these discourses illustrate 
once more Newman's consummate skill in adapting 
his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in 
this case is to right the Eoman Catholic Church 
with the English nation, to exhibit the Eoman 
Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, 
honourable, patriotic body of men, and to put an 
end once for all, if possible, to the long tradition 
of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is 
his problem. He sets about its solution charac- 
teristically. He does not undertake to demon- 
strate the truth of Eoman Catholic doctrines, or, 
by direct evidence and argument, to refute the 
wild charges of hypocrisy and corruption which 
Protestants are habitually making against Eoman 
Catholics. His methods are much subtler than 
these and also much more comprehensive and 
final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant prej- 
udice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its 
elements. He takes it up historically, and ex- 
hibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense par- 
tisan conflict, and its development in the midst of 
peculiarly favourable intellectual and moral con- 
ditions; he shows that it is political in its origin 
and has been inwrought into the very fibre of Eng- 
lish national life: "English Protestantism is the 



86 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

religion of the throne; it is represented, realized, 
taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs 
and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion 
grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in 
argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable 
controversialist, not in an apostolic succession, not 
in sanction of Scripture — but in a royal road to 
faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against 
a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of 
its crown is the tradition of its creed ; and to doubt 
its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. 
Kings are an Englishman's saints and doctors; he 
likes somebody or something at which he can cry, 
*huzzah,' and throw up his hat." 

To hate a " Eomanist," then, is as natural for John 
Bull as to hate a Frenchman, and to libel him is a 
matter of patriotism. The Englishman's romantic 
imagination has for generations been spinning 
myths of Catholic misdoing to satisfy these deep 
instinctive animosities. Moreover, many other 
typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty 
and patriotism, have contributed to foster and de- 
velop this Protestant prejudice. Such are the con- 
trolling practical interests of the middle-class 
English, their content with compromise-working 
schemes, and their contempt for abstractions and 
subtleties ; their shuddering dislike of innovation ; 
their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their 
heroic adherence to familiar, though undeniable 
error ; their insularity ; their hatred of foreigners 



NEWMAN AS A PKOSE-WRITER 87 

in general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in 
particular. With unfailing adroitness of sugges- 
tion, Newman makes clear how these national 
traits, and many others closely related to them, 
have cooperated to originate and develop Protes- 
tant hatred of Roman Catholicism. His mastery 
of the details of social life and of motives of action 
is in this discussion of English history and con- 
temporary life specially conspicuous. Every phase 
of peculiarly English thought and feeling is pres- 
ent to him; every intricacy of the curiously sub- 
terranean British national temperament is traced 
out. And the result is that prejudice is explained 
out of existence. The intense hostility that seems 
so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the 
belief in God or in an outer world, is resolved into 
the expression of a vast mass of petty, and often 
discreditable instincts, and so loses all its validity 
in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery. 

Such is the general plan and scope of Newman^ s 
attack on Protestant prejudice ; in carrying out the 
plan and making his attack brilliantly effective, he 
shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied in- 
vention. He uses fables, allegories, and elaborate 
pieces of irony ; he develops an unending series of 
picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice, 
drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets 
curious traps for this prejudice, catches it at 
unawares, and shows it up to his readers in guises 
they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully upon 



88 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

the instincts that lie at its root, and by clever 
manipulation makes them declare themselves in 
a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Eoman 
Catholicism. In short, he uses all the rhetorical 
devices of which he is master to win a hearing 
from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to 
amuse the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into 
the minds of his readers an all-permeating mood of 
contempt for Protestant narrowness and bigotry, 
and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of 
Roman Catholics. 

IV 

For still another reason the lectures on the Pres- 
ent Position of Catholics are specially interesting to 
a student of Newman's methods; they illustrate 
exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. 
To the genuine rhetorician there is something 
specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, be- 
cause of the opportunity it offers of playing 
with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of 
showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both 
thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a 
rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, 
he had learned from his study of Copleston and 
Whately the possibilities of irony as a controver- 
sial weapon. Copleston's Advice to a Young Re- 
viewer, and Whately 's Historic Doubts relative to 
Napoleon Buonaparte were typical specimens of 
academic irony, where, with impressive dignity 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 89 

and suavity and the most plausible simplicity and 
candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a 
certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, 
were really sneering throughout at a somewhat 
similar policy or theory — that of their opponents 
— and laying it open to helpless ridicule. 

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of 
Newman^s irony — and in this point his irony re- 
sembled that of his masters — was its positive 
argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of 
irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into 
ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer's 
opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a sub- 
stitute for the faith it destroys. Swift's irony is 
usually of this character. It is intensely ill- 
natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it 
sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its 
hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the 
mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the 
judgment and sanity of a man who can be so in- 
veterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is 
so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the 
reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for 
the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from 
Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as 
much as he despises those of Swift's opponents. 
Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its 
innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and 
not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the 
opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailing 



90 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

sliould be abandoned. In the Modest Proposal and 
the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, for 
example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at 
the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of 
Yahoo human nature ; there is very little positive 
argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the 
one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other. 

Newman's irony, on the contrary, is subtle, in- 
tellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its 
insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning preju- 
dice against Eoman Catholics ; it is tirelessly adroit, 
and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the 
opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, 
and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of 
some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its expla- 
nation and is ready with a new opinion to take 
its place. In tone, too, it is very different from 
Swift's irony; it is not enraged and blindly sav- 
age, but more like the best French irony — self- 
possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses 
himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of 
those whom he is trying to move, and carries his 
readers with him in a way that Swift was too con- 
temptuous to aim at. Newman's irony wins the 
wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the 
double task it proposes to itself. 

An example of his irony at its best may be found 
in the amusing piece of declamation against the 
British Constitution and John Bullism which New- 
man puts into the mouth of a Eussian count. The 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 91 

passage occurs in a lecture on the Present Position 
of Catholics, which was delivered just before the 
war with Russia, when English jealousy of Eussia 
and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance 
were most intense. It was, of course, on these 
feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman 
skilfully played when he represented the Russian 
count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British 
Constitution and Blackstone^s Commentaries, and 
as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. 
His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the 
clever manipulation by which he forces the count 
to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his 
stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordi- 
nary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant 
glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the 
author ; now this was the very mood, as Newman 
was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catho- 
lic reader might be led to question with himself 
whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about 
Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like 
the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at 
second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. 
Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicu- 
ous with which Newman makes use of English 
dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Consti- 
tution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the 
adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and 
the far-reaching calculation of Newman's irony. 
Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, 



92 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, 
limitations on the success of his irony; it is some- 
what too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. 
In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously 
with French irony, which, at its best, is so delight- 
fully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, 
and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an in- 
structive study in literary method to compare New- 
man's ironical defence of Eoman Catholicism in 
the passage already referred to with Montesquieu's 
ironical attack upon the same system in the Lettres 
Fersanes. 



When we turn from Newman's methods to his 
style in the narrower meaning of the term, we still 
find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation 
of effect, although here, again, the conscientious 
workmanship becomes evident only on reflection, 
and the general impression is that of easy and in- 
stinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought 
out all that he wrote, with much patient recasting 
and revising. "It is simply the fact," he tells a 
friend in one of his letters, "that I have been 
obliged to take great pains with everything I have 
written, and I often write chapters over and over 
again, besides innumerable corrections and inter- 
linear additions. ... I think I have never writ- 
ten for writing's sake; but my one and single desire 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 93 

and aim has been to do what is so difficult : viz., 
to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this 
has been the motive principle of all my corrections 
and rewritings."^ 

It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacri- 
fice of the decorative impulse in the strenuous 
search for adequacy of expression that keep out 
of Newman's writing every trace of artificiality. 
Sophisticated as is his style, it is never mannered. 
There is no pretence, no flourish, no exhibition of 
rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most 
impressive and the most richly imaginative pas- 
sages in his prose come in because he is betrayed 
into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the 
aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, 
they are curiously congruous in tone with the most 
colloquial parts of his writing. There is no sud- 
den jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordi- 
nary discourse, one chances upon these passages of 
essential beauty; perfect continuity of texture is 
characteristic of his work. This perfect con- 
tinuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive 
fineness and nobleness of ]S"ewman's temper, which 
constantly holds the elements of moral and spir- 
itual beauty in solution, and which imprints a cer- 
tain distinction upon even the commonplace, and 
also the flexibility and elasticity of his style, 
which enables him with such perfect gradation of 
effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to 

1 Letters, II, 476. 



94 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

tlie common. An admirable example of this ex- 
quisite gradation of values and continuity of texture 
may be found in tbe third chapter of Newman's 
Rise and Progress of Universities, where he de- 
scribes Athens and the region round about as the 
ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier 
paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the 
later ones that portray the beauty of Attica, his 
style is simple and easily colloquial ; and when 
from the splendid imaginative picture that his 
descriptive sentences call up, he turns again sud- 
denly to exposition, the transition causes no per- 
ceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness 
of style is exemplified in a passage in the third 
of the discourses on University Teaching, where he 
defines his conception of the Science of Theology, 
In this passage, the change from a scientific expla- 
nation of the duties of the theologian to the almost 
impassioned eloquence of the ascription of good- 
ness and might to the Deity is effected with no 
shock or sense of discontinuity. 

In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect 
sincerity, Newman's style contrasts noticeably 
with the style of a great rhetorician from whom he 
nevertheless took many hints — De Quincey. Of 
his careful study of De Quincey's style there can 
be no question. In the passage on the Deity, to 
which reference has just been made, there are un- 
mistakable reminiscences of De Quincey in the 
iteration of emphasis on an important word, in the 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 95 

frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of 
the periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic 
effects throughout. The piece of writing, how- 
ever, where the likeness to De Quincey and the 
imitation of his manner and music are most evident 
is the sermon on the Fitness of the Glories of Mary, 
— that piece of Newman's prose, it should be noted, 
which is least defensible against the charge of arti- 
ficiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the 
close of the sermon best illustrates the points in 
question: "And therefore she died in private. It 
became Him, who died for the world, to die in the 
world's sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be 
lifted up on high, as a light that could not be hid. 
But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt 
out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the 
garden's shade, and amid the sweet flowers in 
which she had lived. Her departure made no 
noise in the world. The Church went about her 
common duties, preaching, converting, suffering. 
There were persecutions, there was fleeing from 
place to place, there were martyrs, there were tri- 
umphs. At length the rumour spread abroad that 
the Mother of God was no longer upon earth. 
Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her 
relics, but they found them not; did she die at 
Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports 
varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or 
if it was found, it was open; and instead of her 
pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of 



96 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

lilies from the earth which she had touched. So 
inquirers went home marvelling, and waiting for 
further light." ^ 

Though the cadences of Newman^s prose are 
rarely as marked as here, a subtle musical beauty 
runs elusively through it all. Kot that there is 
any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The 
cadences are always wide-ranging and delicately 
shifting, with none of the halting iteration and 
feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, 
the rhythms, subtly pervasive as they are, and 
even symbolic of the mood of the passage as they 
often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, 
but act merely as a mass of undistinguished under- 
and over-tones like those which give to a human 
voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness. 

Newman understood perfectly the symbolic 
value of rhythm and the possibility of imposing 
upon a series of simple words, by delicately sensi- 
tive adjustment, a power over the feelings and the 
imagination like that of an incantation. Several 
of the passages already quoted or referred to illus- 
trate his instinctive adaptation of cadence to mean- 
ing and tone ; another passage, in which this same 
adaptation is exemplified, occurs towards the close 
of the Apologia, where Newman describes the ap- 
parent moral chaos in human history. For subtlety 
of modulation, however, and symbolic suggestive- 
ness, perhaps the tender leave-taking with which 

1' Discourses to Mixed Congregations, ed. 1892, p. 373. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 97 

the Apologia concludes is the most beautiful piece 
of prose that Newman has written : " I have closed 
this history of myself with St. Philip's name upon 
St. Philip's feast-day; and having done so, to 
whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial 
of affection and gratitude, than to St. Philip's sons, 
my dearest brothers of this House, the Priests 
of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, 
Henry Austin Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward 
Caswall, William Paine Neville, and Henry Igna- 
tius Dudley Eider, who have been so faithful to 
me J who have been so sensitive of my needs; who 
have been so indulgent to my failings; who have 
carried me through so many trials; who have 
grudged no sacrifice, if I have asked for it; who 
have been so cheerful under discouragements of 
my causing; who have done so many good works, 
and let me have the credit of them; — with whom 
I have lived so long, with whom I hope to die. 

" And to you especially, dear Ambrose St. John, 
whom God gave me, when He took every one else 
away; who are the link between my old life and 
my new ; who have now for twenty-one years been 
so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender; 
who have let me lean so hard upon you ; who have 
watched me so narrowly ; who have never thought 
of yourself, if I was in question. 

"And in you I gather up and bear in memory 
those familiar, affectionate companions and coun- 
sellors, who, in Oxford, were given to me, one 



&8 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

after anotlier, to be my daily solace and relief; and 
all those others, of great name and high example, 
who were my thorough friends, and showed me 
true attachment in times long past ; and also those 
many younger men, whether I knew them or not, 
who have never been disloyal to me by word or 
deed; and of all these, thus various in their rela- 
tions to me, those more especially who have since 
joined the Catholic Church. 

"And I earnestly pray for this whole company, 
with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once 
were so united, and so happy in our union, may 
even now be brought at length, by the Power of 
the Divine Will, into One Fold and under One 
Shepherd." 

VI 

The careful gradation of values in Newman^ s 
style and the far-reaching sweep of his periods 
connect themselves closely with another of his 
noteworthy characteristics — his breadth of han- 
dling. He manipulates with perfect ease and pre- 
cision vast masses of facts, and makes them all 
contribute with unerring cooperation to the pro- 
duction of a single effect. However minute his 
detail, — and his liking for concreteness which 
will be presently illustrated often incites him to 
great minuteness, — he is careful not to confuse 
his composition, destroy the perspective, or lose 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 99 

sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner 
and the certainty of his handling place him at 
once among really great constructive artists. 

Against this assertion it may be urged that in 
his fiction it is just this breadth of effect and con- 
structive skill that are most noticeably lacking; 
that each of his novels, whatever its merits in 
places, is unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a 
blurred impression. This must at once be granted. 
But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or 
historical work that the real Newman is to be 
found; in such work he is much more himself, 
much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in 
his stories, which, though cleverly turned out, 
were, after all, things by the way, were amateurish 
in execution, and never completely called forth his 
strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find 
occasionally the integrating power of his imagina- 
tion remarkably illustrated. The description in 
Callista of the invading and ravaging locusts is ad- 
mirably sure in its treatment of detail and even 
and impressive in tone; the episode of Gurta's 
madness is powerfully conceived, is swift and sure 
in its action, and is developed with admirable sub- 
ordination and colouring of detail and regard to 
climax. 

On the whole, however, it must be granted that 
in his fiction Newman's sense of total effect and 
his constructive skill are least conspicuous. In 
his abstract discussions they never fail him. First 



100 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

and foremost, they show themselves in the plan of 
each work as a whole. The treatment is invariably 
symmetrical and exhaustive ; part answers to part 
with the precision and the delicacy of adjustment 
of a work of art. Each part is conscious of the 
whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that 
the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem 
present as controlling and centralizing instincts in 
every chapter, paragraph, and sentence. 

In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake 
of securing concreteness and sensuous beauty, 
Newman shows this same integrating power of 
imagination. In the long illustrations, which 
often take almost the proportions of episodes in 
the epical progress of his argument or exposition, 
the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncer- 
tainty of aim ; the strength of Newman's mind and 
purpose subdues his endlessly diverse material, 
and compels it into artistic coherence and vital 
unity ; all details are coloured in harmony with the 
dominant tone of the piece, and reenforce a pre- 
determined mood. When a reader commits him- 
self to one of Newman's discussions, he must 
resign himself to him body and soul, and be pre- 
pared to live and move and have his being in the 
medium of Newman's thought, and, moreover, in 
the special range of thought, and the special mood, 
that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps 
this omnipresence of Newman in the minutest de- 
tails of each discussion becomes ultimately to the 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 101 

careful student of his writing the most convincing 
proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity 
of his conception, and of the vigour and vitality of 
his imagination. 

It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman 
at times becomes wearisome ; that he is over-liberal 
of both explanation and illustration; and that his 
style, though never exuberant in ornament, is some- 
times annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess 
of light. This is probably the point in which 
Newman's style is most open to attack. It is a 
cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly 
suggestive, style ; it does almost too much for the 
reader, and is almost inconsiderately generous. 
Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately 
connected with its peculiar personal charm that 
they can hardly be censured. And it may be 
noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere 
style as Walter Pater has instanced Newman's 
Idea of a University as an example of " the perfect 
handling of a theory." 

One characteristic of the purely suggestive style 
is certainly to be found in Newman's writing, — 
great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact is 
the more noteworthy because a writer who, like 
Newman, is impressive in the mass, and excels in 
securing breadth of effect, very often lacks the 
ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few 
quotations, brought together at random, will show 
what point and terseness Newman could command 



102 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

when he chose. " Ten thousand difficulties do not 
make a doubt." "Great things are done by devo- 
tion to one idea." "Calculation never made a 
hero." "All aberrations are founded on, and have 
their life in, some truth or other." "Great acts 
take time." "A book after all cannot make a 
stand against the wild living intellect of man." 
"To be converted in partnership." "It is not at 
all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an Eng- 
lishman to a dogmatic level." "Paper logic." 
"One is not at all pleased when poetry, or elo- 
quence, or devotion is considered as if chiefly in- 
tended to feed syllogisms." "Here below to live 
is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed 
often." In terseness and sententiousness these 
utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most 
acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of 
course they have not the glitter of paradox to 
which modern coiners of phrases aspire. 

Of wit there is very little to be found in New- 
man's writings; it is not the natural expression of 
his temperament. Wit is too dryly intellectual, 
too external and formal, too little vital, to suit 
Newman's mental habit. To the appeal of humour 
he was distinctly more open. It is from the 
humorous incongruities of imaginary situations 
that his irony secures its most persuasive effects. 
Moreover, whenever he is not necessarily preoccu- 
pied with the tragically serious aspects of life and 
of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 103 

audience, into a formally restrained manner and 
method, he has, in treating any topic, that urbanity 
and half -playful kindliness that come from a large- 
minded and almost tolerant recognition of the 
essential imperfections of life and human nature. 
The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and 
ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge 
and deep feeling and spiritual seriousness, gives to 
much of Newman's work its most distinctive note. 
When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this 
mood and this tone can assert themselves most 
freely, and the result is a style through which a 
gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour, 
and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses 
itself pervasively and persuasively. Throughout 
the Rise and Progress of Universities this tone is 
traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is 
largely to its influence that the description of 
Athens, in the third chapter, owes its peculiar 
charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous 
than the agent of a London " mercantile firm " and 
the Acropolis? or more curiously ill-mated than 
his standards of valuation and the qualities of the 
Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is 
Newman's use of this incongruity or dispropor- 
tion, and how unsuspiciously the "agent of a Lon- 
don Company " ministers to the quiet amusement 
of the reader, and also helps to heighten, by con- 
trast, the effect of beauty and romance and mystery 
that Newman is aiming at. 



104 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

Several allusions have already been made to 
Newman's liking for concreteness, and in an 
earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract was 
described and illustrated at length. These predi- 
lections of his have left their unmistakable mark 
on his style in ways more technical than those that 
have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for 
a scholar, exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; 
the most ordinary and unparsable turns of every- 
day speech are inwrought into the texture of his 
style. In the Apologia he speaks of himself in 
one place as having had " a lounging, free-and-easy 
way of carrying things on," and the phrase both 
defines and illustrates one characteristic of his 
style. Idioms that have the crude force of popular 
speech, the vitality without the vulgarity of slang, 
abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear 
recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Angli- 
can position, he says : " The Via Media was an im- 
possible idea; it was what I had called 'standing 
on one leg.'" In describing his loss of control 
over his party in 1840 he declares : " I never had 
a strong wrist, but at the very time when it was 
most needed, the reins had broken in my hands." 
Of the ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he 
exclaims: "You do but play a sort of 'hunt the 
slipper, ' with the fault of our nature, till you go to 
Christianity." Illustrations of this idiomatic and 
homely phrasing might be endlessly multiplied. 
Moreover, to the concreteness of colloquial phras- 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 105 

ing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific 
word. Other things being equal, he prefers the 
name of the species to that of the genus, and the 
name of the class to that of the species; he is 
always urged forward towards the individual and 
the actual; his mind does not lag in the region of 
abstractions and formulas, but presses past the 
general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image 
or the example, and into the tangible, glowing, 
sensible world of fact. His imagery, though never 
obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though 
never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. 
It is so inevitable, however, springs so organically 
from the thought and the mood of the moment, 
that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is con- 
scious only of grasping, easily and securely, the 
writer's meaning. He must first look back through 
the sentences and study the style in detail before 
he will come to realize its continual, but decisive, 
divergence from the literal and commonplace, and 
its essential freshness and distinction. 

On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate 
figures; but commonly for purposes of exposition 
or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well 
note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts 
itself to every turn and phase of the thought, and 
the surprising omnipresence and suggestiveness of 
the tropical phrasing. These qualities of New- 
man's style are illustrated in the following passage 
from the Development of Christian Doctrine : — 



106 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

" Whatever be the risk of corruption from inter- 
course with the world around, such a risk must be 
encountered if a great idea is duly to be under- 
stood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. 
It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles 
into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape 
the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, 
nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better 
claim to be considered one and the same, though 
externally protected from vicissitude and change. 
It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is 
clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly 
be made of this image, it does not apply to the 
history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the 
contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, 
when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. 
It necessarily rises out of an existing state of 
things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its 
vital element needs disengaging from what is for- 
eign and temporary, and is employed in efforts 
after freedom which become more vigorous and 
hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are 
no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. 
At first no one knows what it is, or what it is 
worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; 
it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the 
ground under it, and feels its way. From time 
to time, it makes essays which fail, and are in con- 
sequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which 
way to go ; it wavers, and at length strikes out in 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 107 

one definite direction. In time it enters upon 
strange territory ; points of controversy alter their 
bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers 
and hopes appear in new relations ; and old princi- 
ples reappear under new forms. It changes with 
them in order to remain the same. In a higher 
world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to 
change, and to be perfect is to have changed 
often." ^ The image of the river pervades this pas- 
sage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and 
never determines or even constrains the progress of 
the thought. The imagery simply seems to insinu- 
ate the ideas into the reader's mind with a certain 
novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. 
Another passage of much this kind has already 
been quoted, where Newman describes the advent- 
urous investigator scaling the crags of truth. ^ 

Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman's 
generous use of examples and illustrations. What- 
ever be the principle he is discussing, he is not 
content till he has realized it for the reader in 
tangible, visible form, until he has given it the 
cogency and intensity of appeal that only sensa- 
tions or images possess. In all these ways, then, 
by his idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his 
specific vocabulary, by his delicately adroit use of 
metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery, 
and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, 

1 Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40. 

2 See above, p. 79. 



108 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

Newman keeps resolutely close to tlie concrete, and 
imparts everywhere to his style warmth, vividness, 
colour, convincing actuality. 



VII 

It remains to suggest briefly Newman's relation 
to what was most characteristic in the thought and 
feeling of his times. Without any attempt at a 
technical analysis of his doctrine or at a special 
study of his theorizing in religion and philosophy, 
it will be possible to connect him, by virtue of cer- 
tain temperamental characteristics, and certain 
prevailing modes of conceiving life, with what was 
most distinctive in the literature of the early part 
of the century. Interpreted most searchingly, his 
early Anglicanism and his later Catholicism were 
peculiar expressions of that Komantic spirit which 
realized itself with such splendour and power in 
the best and most vital literature of his day and 
generation. 

Perhaps the most general formula for the work 
of English literature during the first quarter of the 
present century is the rediscovery and vindication 
of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth 
century had been to order, and to systematize, and 
to name; its favourite methods had been analysis 
and generalization. It asked for no new experi- 
ence; it sought only to master and reduce to for- 
mulas, and to find convenient labels for what 



I 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 109 

experience it already possessed. It was perpetu- 
ally in searcli of standards and canons ; it was con- 
ventional through and through; and its men felt 
secure from the ills of time only when sheltered 
under some ingenious artificial construction of rule 
and precedent. Whatever lay beyond the scope of 
their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked 
and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery 
which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible 
to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its 
laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from 
such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their 
eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at 
their feet. The familiar bustle of the town, the 
thronging streets of the city, the gay life of the 
drawing-room, and coffee-house, and play-house; 
or the more exalted life of Parliament and Court, 
the intrigues of State-chambers, the manoeuvres of 
the battle-field; the aspects of human activity, 
wherever collective man in his social capacity 
goes through the orderly and comprehensible 
changes of his ceaseless pursuit of worldly happi- 
ness and worldly success ; these were the subjects 
that for the men of the eighteenth century had 
absorbing charm : in seeking to master this intri- 
cate play of forces, to fathom the motives below 
it, to tabulate its experiences, to set up standards 
to guide the individual successfully through the 
intricacies of this commonplace, every-day world, 
they spent their utmost energy, and to these tasks 



110 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

they instinctively limited themselves. In poetry, 
it was a generalized view of life that they aimed 
at, a semi-philosophical representation of man's 
nature and actions. Pope, the typical poet of the 
century, "stooped to truth and moralized his 
song." Dr. Johnson, the most authoritative critic 
of the century, taught that the poet should "re- 
mark general properties and large appearances 
. . . and must neglect the minuter discrimina- 
tions, which one may have remarked, and another 
have neglected, or those characteristics which are 
alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness." In 
prose, the same moralizing and generalizing ten- 
dencies prevailed, and found their most adequate 
and thorough-going expression in the abstract and 
pretentiously latinized style of Dr. Johnson. 

Everywhere thought gave the law; the senses 
and the imagination were kept jealously in subor- 
dination. The abstract, the typical, the general 
— these were everywhere exalted at the expense 
of the image, the specific experience, the vital 
fact. In religion, the same tendencies showed 
themselves. Orthodoxy and Deism alike were 
mechanical in their conception of Nature and of 
God. Both Free-thinkers and Apologists tried to 
systematize religious experience, and to rationalize 
theology. In the pursuit of historical evidences 
and of logical demonstrations of the truth or falsity 
of religion, genuine religious emotion was almost 
neglected, or was actually condemned. Enthusi- 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER m 

asm was distrusted or abhorred; an enthusiast was a 
madman. Intense feeling of all kinds was regarded 
askance, and avoided as irrational, unsettling, prone 
to disarrange systems, and to overturn standards, 
and burst the bonds of formulas. 

It was to this limited manner of living life and 
of conceiving of life that the great movement 
which, for lack of a better name, may be called 
the Romantic Movement, was to put an end. The 
Romanticists sought to enrich life with new emo- 
tions, to conquer new fields of experience, to come 
into imaginative touch with far distant times, to 
give its due to the encompassing world of dark- 
ness and mystery, and even to pierce through the 
darkness in the hope of finding, at the heart of 
the mystery, a transcendental world of infinite 
beauty and eternal truth. A keener sense of the 
value of life penetrated them and stirred them into 
imaginative sympathy with much that had left the 
men of the eighteenth century unmoved. They 
found in the naive life of Nature and animals and 
children picturesqueness and grace that were want- 
ing in the sophisticated life of the " town " ; they 
delighted in the mysterious chiaroscuro of the 
Middle Ages, in its rich blazonry of passion, and 
its ever-changing spectacular magnificence; they 
looked forward with ardour into the future, and 
dreamed dreams of the progress of man; they 
opened their hearts to the influences of the spir- 
itual world, and religion became to them some- 



112 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

thing more than respectability and morality. In 
every way they endeavoured to give some new 
zest to life, to impart to it some fine novel flavour, 
to attain to some exquisite new experience. They 
sought this new experience imaginatively in the 
past, with Scott and Southey ; they sought it with 
fierce insistence in foreign lands, following Byron, 
and in the wild exploitation of individual fancy 
and caprice; they sought it with Coleridge and 
Wordsworth through the revived sensitiveness of 
the spirit and its intuitions of a transcendental 
world of absolute reality; they sought Ig with 
Shelley in the regions of the vast inane. 

Now it was in the midst of these restless con- 
ditions and under the influence of all this new 
striving and aspiration that Newman's youth and 
most impressionable years of development were 
spent, and he took colour and tone from his epoch 
to a degree that has often been overlooked. His 
work, despite its reactionary character, indeed, 
partly because of it, is a genuine expression of 
the Eomantic spirit, and can be understood only 
when thus interpreted and brought into relation 
with the great tendencies of thought and feeling of 
the early part of our century. Of his direct in- 
debtedness to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, 
he has himself made record in the Apologia and 
in his Autobiographical Sketch.^ But far more im- 

1 Apologia, ed. 1890, p. 96. 

2 Letters and Correspondence, I, 18. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 113 

portant than the influence of any single man was 
the penetrating and determining action upon him 
of the Eomantic atmosphere, overcharged as it 
was with intense feeling and tingling with new 
thought. The results of this action may be traced 
throughout his temperament and in all his work. 

Mediaevalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive 
note of the Eomantic spirit, and, certainly, New- 
man was intensely alive to the beauty and the 
poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One 
is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great 
mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth cen- 
tury and heroically striving to remodel modern life 
in harmony with his temperamental needs. His 
imagination was possessed with the Eomantic vision 
of the greatness of the mediaeval Church, — of its 
splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power 
over the hearts and lives of its members ; and the 
Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to 
reconstruct the English Church in harmony with 
this Eomantic ideal, to rouse the Church to a vital 
realization of its own great traditions, and to re- 
store to it the prestige and the dominating position 
it had had in the past. As Scott's imagination 
was fascinated with the picturesque parapherualia 
of feudalism, — with its jousts, and courts of love, 
and its coats of mail and buff -jerkins, — so New- 
man's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous 
ritual and ceremonial, the art and architecture of 
medissval Christianity, and found in them the sym- 



114 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 

bols of the spirit of mystery and awe which was 
for him the essentially religious spirit, and of the 
mystical truths of which revealed religion was 
made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was 
Erastian and worldly; it was apt to regard itself 
as merely an ally of the State for the maintenance 
of order and spread of morality; it was coldly 
rational in belief and theology, and prosaic in its 
conception of religious truth and of its own posi- 
tion and functions. Newman sought to revive in 
the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine mis- 
sion and the intense spiritual consciousness of the 
Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to religion its 
mystical character, to exalt the sacramental sys- 
tem as the divinely appointed means for the sal- 
vation of souls, and to impose once more on men's 
imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical 
organization, the direct representative of God in 
the world's affairs. Such was the mediaeval ideal 
to which he devoted himself. Both he and Scott 
substantially ruined themselves through their 
medisevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to 
place his private and family life upon a feudal 
basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; 
Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic, 
but more intrinsically hopeless task, — that of re- 
creating the whole English Church in harmony 
with mediaeval conceptions. 

Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of 
the English Church in this imaginative spirit. In 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 115 

one of his Essays, Newman describes how Keble 
had made the Church "poetical," had "kindled 
hearts towards it, " and by " his happy magic " had 
thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a 
glamour and beauty of which they had for many 
generations been devoid. It was to the continu- 
ance and the furtherance of this process of regen- 
eration and transfiguration that Newman devoted 
the Tractarian movement. 

But the essentially Eomantic character of the 
new movement comes out in other ways than in 
its idealization of the Church. The relation of 
Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely 
akin to that of the Eomanticists. Newman, like 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found Nature 
mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange 
significance, a divinely elaborated language where- 
by God speaks through symbols to the human soul. 
Keble 's Christian Tear is full of this interpreta- 
tion of natural sights and sounds as images of 
spiritual truth, and with this mystical conception 
of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was 
for him as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as 
for Wordsworth or Shelley, and was as truly for 
him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment 
of God. But in interpreting the emotional value 
of Nature Newman had recourse to a symbolism 
drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mys- 
tical beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his 
imagination a Platonic ideal world; as with Shelley, 



116 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

or adumbrating the world of eternal verity of Ger- 
man transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, suggested the presence and power of 
seraphs and angels. Of the angels he says, " Every 
breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beau- 
tiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their 
garments, the waving of the robes of those whose 
faces see God." Again, he asks, "What would be 
the thoughts of a man who, when examining a 
flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, 
which he treats as something so beneath him in the 
scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was 
in the presence of some powerful being who was 
hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, 
— who, though concealing his wise hand, was giv- 
ing them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as 
being God's instrument for the purpose, — nay, 
whose robe and ornaments those objects were, 
which he was so eager to analyze? "^ 

Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism 
that pervades these passages, the mystical mood 
in the contemplation of Nature that underlies and 
suggests them is substantially the same that ex- 
presses itself through other imagery in the Eo- 
mantic poets. In his intense sensitiveness, then, 
to the emotional value of the visible universe, 
and in his interpretation of the beauty of hill 
and valley and mountain and stream in terms 
of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be 

1 Apologia, p. 28. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 117 

said to have shared in the Eomantic Keturn to 
Nature. 

But in a still more important way, Newman's 
work was expressive of the Keturn to Nature. 
Under this term is to be included not merely the 
fresh delight that the Eomanticists felt in the 
splendour of the firmament and the tender beauty 
or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their 
eager recognition of the value of the instinctive, 
the spontaneous, the natural in life, as opposed to 
the artificial, the self-conscious, the systematic, 
and the conventional. This recognition pervades 
all the literature of the first quarter of our cen- 
tury, and, in fact, in one form or another, is the 
characteristic note of what is most novel in the 
thought and the life of the time. In this Eeturn 
to Nature Newman shared. For him, as for all 
the Eomanticists, life itself is more than what we 
think about life, experience is infinitely more sig- 
nificant than our formulas for summing it up, and 
transcends them incalculably. General terms are 
but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with 
the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and 
feeling. Newman's elaborate justification of this 
indictment of logic is wrought out in the Grammar 
of Assent and in his Sermon on Implicit and Ex- 
plicit Reason. 

Throughout these discourses he pleads for those 
vital processes of thought and feeling and intui- 
tion which every man goes through for himself in 



118 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he 
can perhaps describe in but a stammering and in- 
consequent fashion in the terms of the schoolman's 
logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes, 
Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever 
concrete matter they apply themselves to, and the 
truth that they reach need be none the less true 
because they have not the knack of setting forth 
syllogistically their reasons for accepting it. In 
his rejection, then, of formal demonstration as the 
sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition 
of the limitations of logic, and in his deep convic- 
tion of the surpassing importance of the spontane- 
ous and instinctive in life Newman was at one with 
the Eomanticists, and in all these particulars he 
shared in their Eeturn to Nature. 

This insistence of Newman's on the vital char- 
acter of truth is a point, the importance of which 
cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being 
made to grasp what is essential in his psychology 
and his ways of conceiving of life and of human 
nature. For him truth does not exist primarily, as 
for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems 
of text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of 
living men. In these minds and hearts truth 
grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its 
appeal is through numberless other channels than 
those of the mind. Man is for Newman primarily 
an agent, — an acting creature, — not an intellect 
with merely accidental relations to an outer world. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 119 

First and foremost he is a doer, a bringer about 
of results, a realizer of hopes and ambitions and 
ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of 
prejudices and passions; and it is in response to 
these mighty and ceaselessly operating springs of 
action that he makes his way through the world 
and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to com- 
mend itself to such a being, must come not merely 
by way of the brain, but also by that of the heart; 
it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, 
but must be concrete and vital. If it be religious 
truth, it must not take the form of logical demon- 
strations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the 
symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the 
lives of saints and doctors, authoritative and ven- 
erable in the creeds and liturgies of a hierarchical 
organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by 
the divinely appointed representatives of the 
Source of all Truth. In these forms religious 
truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, 
to take complete possession of them, to master 
their minds and hearts, and to rule their lives. 

But what shall be the test of such truth? How 
shall the individual be sure of its claims? How 
shall he choose between rival systems? Here, 
again, Newman refuses to be content with the 
formal and the abstract, and goes straight to life 
itself. In the search for a criterion of truth he 
rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse 
to tests which call into activity the whole of a 



120 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

man's nature. It is the Illative Sense that detects 
and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is 
simply the entire mind of the individual vigor- 
ously grasping concrete facts with all their impli- 
cations for the heart and for the imagination and 
for conduct, and extracting their peculiar signifi- 
cance. This process, by which the individual 
searches for and attains truth in concrete matters, 
is admirably described in the passage quoted in 
the second chapter of the present Study, where 
the truth-seeker's progress is likened to that of 
a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole 
nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is 
to be won. The formal logic of the schools falls 
short of life ; its symbols are general terms, colour- 
less abstractions, from which all the palpitating 
warmth and persuasiveness of real life have been 
carefully drained. Propositions fashioned out of 
these colourless general terms cannot by any pro- 
cess of syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend 
the whole truth of a religious system. They leave 
out inevitably what is most vital, and what is 
therefore most intimate in its appeal to the indi- 
vidual, — to his heart and practical instincts, and 
his imagination. "We proceed as far indeed as 
we can, by the logic of language, but we are 
obliged to supplement it by the more subtle and 
elastic logic of thought; for forms by themselves 
prove nothing."^ "It is to the living mind that 

1 Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 359. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 121 

we must look for the means of using correctly 
principles of whatever kind."^ "In all of these 
separate actions of the intellect, the individual is 
supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under 
circumstances, may be justijB.ed in opposing him- 
self to the judgment of the whole world; though 
he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they 
go, and is in consequence bound to use them."^ 
Absolute "proof can never be furnished to us by 
the logic of words, for as certitude is of the mind, 
so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every 
one who reasons is his own centre."^ The prog- 
ress of the individual "is a living growth, not a 
mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, 
not the formulas and contrivances of language."* 

The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate 
the facts that Newman aimed to make religion an 
intensely concrete, personal experience, and to 
fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and 
richly beautiful feeling; and that he also set him- 
self everywhere, consciously and directly, against 
the eighteenth century ideal, according to which 
reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth 
and regulator of conduct. In these respects, New- 
man's work was in perfect harmony with that of 
the Eomanticists. Like them he was pleading for 
the spontaneous, for the emotions and the imagina- 
tion, for what is most vital in life, in opposition to 

1 Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 360. s /^jV?., p. 345. 
2J6id, p. 353. */6id.,p. 350. 



122 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 

the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees 
of logic. 

In the following points, then, Newman's kinship 
with the Romanticists is recognizable: in his im- 
aginative sympathy with the past, in the range 
and perspective of his historical consciousness, 
and in his devotion to an ideal framed largely in 
accordance with a loving reverence for mediaeval 
life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sym- 
pathy with Nature, his interpretation of Nature as 
symbolic of spiritual truth, his rejection of reason 
as the guide of life, and his recognition of the in- 
adequacy of generalizations and formulas to the 
wealth of actual life and to the intensity and va- 
riety of personal experience, are also characteristics 
that mark his relation to the men of his period. 

Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning 
of the term also classes Newman among Romantic 
writers. His debt to De Quincey has already been 
noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as 
De Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves 
his prose into such a lustrous, shining surface 
through the continual use of sensations and images 
as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet 
the glowing beauty, the picture-making power, the 
occasional imaginative splendour, the elaborate 
swelling music of Newman's writings, place him 
as a master of prose in the same group with De 
Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and part him 
from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. 



NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 123 

No prose can more surely send quivering over 
the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery 
of life, than certain of Newman's sermons, and 
passages here and there in his Apologia and 
in his Essays. Through the play, then, of his 
imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, 
because of the ease with which in a moment his 
prose can carry the reader into regions of impas- 
sioned and mystical feeling, even because of the 
vital, intimate warmth and colour of his phrasing, 

— qualities so different from the hard, external 
glitter of Macaulay's specific, but rhetorical style, 

— Newman reveals his kinship with the great 
group of poets and prose-writers who deepened and 
enriched the imaginative life of the early part of 
our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism 
are proverbially conservative powers. It may be 
for this reason that the new spiritual forces of 
Eomanticism did not renovate the Church through 
the Oxford movement until a full generation after 
they had made almost wholly their own the purely 
imaginative literature and life of the English 
nation. 



MATTHEW AENOLD 
I 

Admirers of Arnold's prose find it well to admit 
frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack 
of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere 
spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when 
it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there 
in Arnold's prose, there is just a trace — some- 
times more than a trace — of such a strut. He 
condescends to his readers with a gracious elabo- 
rateness; he is at great pains to make them feel 
that they are his equals ; he undervalues himself 
playfully; he assures us that "he is an unlearned 
bellettristic trifler " ; he insists over and over again 
that "he is an unpretending writer, without a 
philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, 
and coherent principles." All this he does smil- 
ingly ; but the smile seems to many on whom its 
favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under- 
valuation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. 
He is very debonair, — this apologetic writer, very 
self-assured, at times even jaunty. 

Stanch admirers of Arnold have always rel- 
ished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed 
124 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 125 

its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its in- 
nuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its 
covert, satirical humour infinitely entertaining and 
stimulating. Moreover, however seriously dis- 
posed they may be, however exacting of all the 
virtues from the author of their choice, they have 
been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold 
with their serious inclinations, for they have been 
confident that these tricks of manner implied no 
essential or radical defect in Arnold's humanity, 
no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of 
broad sympathy. 

Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have 
been amply justified of their confidence since the 
publication in 1895 of Arnold's Letters. The 
Arnold of these letters is a man the essential 
integrity — wlwleness — of whose nature is incon- 
testable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging 
sympathy with all classes of men are unmistaka- 
bly expressed on every page of his correspondence. 
We see him having to do with people widely diverse 
in their relations to him : with those close of kin, 
with chance friends, with many men of business 
or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaint- 
ances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. 
In all his intercourse the same sweet-tempered 
frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are 
manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity 
or the treacherous irony that are to be found in 
much of his prose. 



126 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Moreover, the record that these Letters contain 
of close application to uncongenial tasks must have 
been a revelation to many readers who have had 
to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary 
men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had repre- 
sented him as " a high priest of the kid-glove per- 
suasion," as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary 
fop idling his time away over poetry and recom- 
mending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereign- 
est thing in nature for the inward bruises of the 
spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all 
maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the 
revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond 
cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly 
laborious men of his time. 

For a long period of years Arnold held the post 
of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week 
after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, 
one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of 
the most delicate of literary organizations, to the 
drudgery of examining in its minutest details the 
work of the schools in such elementary subjects as 
mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, 
he writes to his mother, " I am now at the work I 
dislike most in the world — looking over and mark- 
ing examination papers. I was stopped last week 
by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty 
papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I 
am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time." 
Two years later he laments again: "I am being 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 127 

driven furious by seven hundred closely written 
grammar papers, which I have to look over." 
During these years he was holding the Chair of 
Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since estab- 
lished his reputation as one of the foremost of the 
younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced 
still to endure — and he endured them till within 
a few years of his death in 1888 — the exactions 
of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. More- 
over, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, 
he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and 
effectively. He was sent on several occasions to 
the Continent to examine and report on foreign 
school systems ; his reports on German and French 
education show immense diligence of investigation, 
a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and per- 
sistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for 
themselves must have been unattractive and un- 
rewarding. 

The record of this severe labour is to be found 
in Arnold's Letters, and it must dispose once for 
all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante 
and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of 
years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in 
minutely practical ways, to better the educational 
system of England; he was persistently striving 
both to spread sounder ideals of elementary edu- 
cation and to make more effective the system actu- 
ally in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and 
laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness 



128 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

and light as well as through his somewhat debonair 
contributions to literature. 

In another way his Letters have done much to 
reveal the innermost core of Arnold's nature, and 
so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. 
They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote 
Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly appre- 
hended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a 
letter to his mother, he says: "I more and more 
become conscious of having something to do and 
of a resolution to do it. . . . "Whether one lives 
long or not, to be less and less personal in one's 
desires and workings is the great matter." In a 
letter of 1863 he had already written in much the 
same strain: "However, one cannot change Eng- 
lish ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change 
them, without saying imperturbably what one 
thinks, and making a good many people uncom- 
fortable." And in a letter of the same year he 
exclaims : " It is very animating to think that one 
at last has a chance of getting at the English pub- 
lic. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one 
wants to do with it." A work to do! The phrase 
recalls Cardinal Newman and the well-known 
anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all 
the days of greatest danger he insisted that he 
should get well because he had a work to do in 
England. Despite Arnold's difference in tempera- 
ment from Newman and the widely dissimilar task 
he proposed to himself, he was no less in earnest 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 129 

than Newman, and no less convinced of the impor- 
tance of his task. 

The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Ar- 
nold's style, then, need not trouble even the most 
conscientious of his admirers. To many of his 
readers it is in itself, as has been already sug- 
gested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the 
more conscientious folk and perhaps also the 
severer judges of literary quality, are bound to 
find it artistically a blemish; but they need not 
at any rate regard it as implying any radical de- 
fect in Arnold's humanity or as the result of cheap 
cynicism or of inadequate sympathy. In point of 
fact, the true account of the matter seems rather 
to lie in the paradox that the apparent supercili- 
ousness of Arnold's style comes from the very 
intensity of his moral earnestness, and that the 
imperfections of his manner are often the result 
of an over-conscientious desire to conciliate. 



II 

What, then, was Arnold's controlling purpose 
in his prose-writing? What was the " work " that 
he "wanted to do with the English public"? In 
trying to find answers to these questions recourse 
will first be had to stray phrases in Arnold's 
prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses, 
from different points of view, of his central ideal ; 
later, their fragmentary suggestions will be brought 



130 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

together into something like a comprehensive 
formula. 

In the lectures on Celtic Literature Arnold points 
out, in closing, that it has been his aim to lead 
Englishmen to "reunite themselves with their 
better mind and with the world through science " ; 
that he has sought to help them " conquer the hard 
unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to 
supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the 
variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual 
life." In the Preface to his first volume of Essays 
he explains that he is trying "to pull out a few 
more stops in that powerful, but at present some- 
what narrow-toned organ, the modern English- 
man." In Culture and Anarchy he assures us that 
his object is to convince men of the value of " cult- 
ure"; to incite them to the pursuit of "perfec- 
tion " ; to help " make reason and the will of God 
prevail." And, again, in the same work he de- 
clares that he is striving to intensify throughout 
England " the impulse to the development of the 
whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts 
of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their 
chance." 

These phrases give, often with capricious pictu- 
resqueness, hints of the prevailing intention with 
which Arnold writes. They may well be supple- 
mented by a series of phrases in which, in simi- 
larly picturesque fashion, he finds fault with life 
as it actually exists in England, with the indi- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 131 

vidual Englishman as he encounters him from day 
to day; these phrases, through their critical im- 
plications, also reveal the purpose that is always 
present in Arnold's mind, when he addresses his 
countrymen. "Provinciality," Arnold points out 
as a widely prevalent and injurious characteristic 
of English literature ; it argues a lack of centrality, 
carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to 
relatively unimportant matters. Again, "arbi- 
trariness " and " eccentricity " are noticeable traits 
both of English literature and scholarship ; Arnold 
finds them everywhere deforming Professor New- 
man's interpretations of Homer, and he further 
comments on them as in varying degrees " the great 
defect of English intellect — the great blemish of 
English literature." In religion he takes special 
exception to the "loss of totality" that results 
from sectarianism ; this is the penalty, Arnold con- 
tends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hos- 
tility to the established church; in his pursuit 
of his own special enthusiasm the Nonconformist 
becomes, like Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by 
himself." 

From all these brief quotations this much at 
least is plain, that what Arnold is continually 
recommending is the complete development of the 
human type, and that what he is condemning is 
departure from some finely conceived ideal of 
human excellence — from some scheme of human 
nature in which all its powers have full and har- 



132 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

monious play. The various phrases that have been 
quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, 
imply, as Arnold's continual purpose in his prose- 
writiugs, the recommendation of this ideal of 
human excellence and the illustration of the evils 
that result from its neglect. Evidently, his im- 
agination is haunted by some symmetrical scheme 
of character — by some exquisitely conceived pat- 
tern of perfection — wherein manners and know- 
ledge, and passion and religion, all have their due 
value, and work together for righteousness. With 
this scheme in mind, he goes through the length 
and breadth of England, scanning each class of 
men he meets, and questioning how far its mem- 
bers conform to his type. And his continual 
purpose is to stir in the minds of his fellow- 
countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the 
value of this perfect type and of the dangers of 
disregarding it. The significance and the scope 
of this purpose will become clearer if we consider 
some of the imperfect ideals that Arnold finds 
operative in place of his absolute ideal, and note 
their misleading and depraving effects. 

One such partial ideal is the worship of the ex- 
cessively practical and the relentlessly utilitarian 
as the only things in life worth while. England 
is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a 
prevailingly practical age ; the unregenerate prod- 
uct of this nation and age is the Philistine, and 
against the Philistine Arnold never wearies of 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I33 

inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering 
enemy of the children of light, of the chosen 
people, of those who love art and ideas disinter- 
estedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, 
for developing the material resources of the coun- 
try, for starting companies, building bridges, 
making railways, and establishing plants. The 
machinery of life — its material organization — 
monopolizes all his attention. He judges of life 
by the outside, and is careless of the things of the 
spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; 
but his religion is as materialistic as his every-day 
existence; his heaven is a triumph of engineering 
skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in Sydney 
Smith's phrase, to eat "pdtes de foie gras to the 
sound of trumpets." Against men of this class 
Arnold cannot show himself too cynically severe. 
They are pitiful distortions ; the practical instincts 
have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry 
and integrity of the human type. The senses and 
the will to live are monopolizing and determine all 
the man's energy toward utilitarian ends. The 
power of beauty, the power of intellect and know- 
ledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied. 
Society is in serious danger unless men of this 
class can be touched with a sense of their short- 
comings ; made aware of the larger values of life ; 
made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the 
importance of the things of the mind and the spirit. 
Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which 



134 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Arnold laments, is the narrowly and unintelli- 
gently religious ideal. The middle-class English- 
man is, according to Arnold, a natural " Hebraist " ; 
his whole energy is spent, when he is at his best, 
in the struggle to obey certain traditional rules of 
morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the 
question as to whether or no they be founded in 
right reason, he has little or no interest. In gen- 
eral, he is careless or contemptuous of speculation 
and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is 
intent upon the fulfilment of a conventional code 
of duty. Conduct, narrowly conceived, is his only 
concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him; 
art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the dis- 
interested pursuit of truth seems waste of energy 
or even vicious self-assertion. All the bright irre- 
sponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in 
thought for their own sakes, that are characteristic 
of what Arnold calls the " Hellenistic " temper — 
its burning eagerness to knoiu, its strenuous will 
to be sure that its truth is really truth — all these 
qualities and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnor- 
mal, pagan, altogether evil. The Puritanism of the 
seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted 
expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the 
conceptions of life that were then wrought out the 
middle classes in England have never wholly es- 
caped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a 
narrow vision, recognized only a few of its varied 
interests, and provided for the needs of only a part 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 135 

of man's nature. - Yet their theories and concep- 
tions of life — theories and conceptions that were 
limited in the first place by the age in which they 
originated, and in the second place by a Hebraistic 
lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of 
beauty and knowledge — these limited theories and 
conceptions have imposed themselves constrain- 
ingly on many generations of Englishmen. To- 
day they remain, in all their narrowness and with 
an ever-increasing disproportion to existing con- 
ditions, the most influential guiding principles of 
large masses of men. Such men spend their lives 
in a round of petty religious meetings and employ- 
ments. They think all truth is summed up in 
their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. 
New truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art dis- 
tracts from religion, and is a siren against whose 
seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses 
seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life 
seems sadly mistaken, and the men who hold it 
seem fantastic distortions of the authentic human 
type. The absurdities and the dangers of the un- 
restricted Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments 
in Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma, 
in God and the Bible, and in St. Paul and Prot- 
estantism. 

Still another kind of deformity arises when the 
intellect grows self-assertive and develops over- 
weeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern 
man of science is specially prone j his exclusive 



136 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

study of material facts leads to crude, unregenerate 
strength of intellect, and leaves him careless of the 
value truth may have for the spirit and of its 
glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for 
the philosopher and the scholar, too, over-intel- 
lectualism has its peculiar dangers. The devotee 
of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the 
real values of life, and in his exorbitant desire for 
unity and thoroughness of organization, to miss 
the free play of vital forces that gives to life its 
manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ulti- 
mate reality. Bentham and Comte are examples 
of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of system. 
" Culture is always assigning to system-makers and 
systems a smaller share in the bent of human des- 
tiny than their friends like." As for the pedant, 
he is merely the miser of facts, who grows with- 
ered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious 
ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all 
these various types offend through their fanatical 
devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in 
recent years well said, the intellect is " but a par- 
venu,'' and the other powers of life, despite the 
Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have 
rights that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, 
then, like the over-development of any other 
power, leads to disproportion and disorder. 

Such being some of the partial ideals against 
which Arnold warns his readers, what account does 
he give of that perfect human type in all its integ- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I37 

rity, in terms of which he criticises these aberra- 
tions or deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that 
any attempt at an exact and systematic definition 
of this type would be somewhat grotesque and 
presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such 
an attempt. Still, he has recorded clearly, in 
many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in 
man that are essential to perfect humanity, and 
that must all be duly recognized and developed, if 
man is to attain in full scope what nature offers. 
A representative passage may be quoted from the 
lecture on Literature and Science : " When we set 
ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the 
building up of human life, and say that they are 
the power of conduct, the power of intellect and 
knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of 
social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can 
hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in 
rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending 
to scientiiic exactness, does yet give a fairly true 
representation of the matter. Human nature is 
built up of these powers; we have the need for 
them all. When we have rightly met and ad- 
justed the claims for them all, we shall then be in 
a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness 
with Avisdom." 

These same ideas are presented, under a some- 
what different aspect and with somewhat different 
terminology, in the first chapter of Culture and 
Anarchy: "The great aim of culture [is] the aim 



138 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is 
and to make it prevail." Culture seeks "the de- 
termination of this question through all the voices 
of human experience which have been heard upon 
it, — of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, 
as well as of religion, — in order to give a greater 
fulness and certainty to its solution. . . . Ee- 
ligion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; 
and culture, in like manner, places human perfec- 
tion in an internal condition, in the growth and 
predominance of our humanity proper, as distin- 
guished from our animality. It places it in the 
ever-increasing efi&cacy and in the general har- 
monious expansion of those gifts of thought and 
feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, 
and happiness of human nature. As I have said 
on a former occasion: 'It is in making endless ad- 
ditions to itself, in the endless expansion of its 
powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, 
that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. 
To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, 
and that is the true value of culture.' " 

In such passages as these Arnold comes as near 
as he ever comes to defining the perfect human 
type. He does not profess to define it universally 
and in abstract terms, for indeed he " hates " ab- 
stractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated 
them. He does not even describe concretely for 
men of his own time and nation the precise equi- 
poise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 139 

names these powers, suggests the ends towards 
which they must by their joint working contribute, 
and illustrates, through examples, the evil effects 
of the preponderance or absence of one and another. 
Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he 
describes in detail the method by which the deli- 
cate adjustment of these rival powers may be se- 
cured in the typical man; suggests who is to be 
the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, 
and indicates the process by which this judge may 
most persuasively lay his opinions before those 
whom he wishes to influence. The method for 
the attainment of the perfect type is culture; the 
censor of defective types and the judge of the 
rival claims of the cooperant powers is the critic; 
and the process by which this judge clarifies his 
own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is 
criticism, 

III 

We are now at the centre of Arnold's theory of 
life and hold the key to his system of belief, so 
far as he had a system. His reasons for attach- 
ing to the work of the critic the importance he 
palpably attached to it are at once apparent. 
Criticism is the method by which the perfect type 
of human nature is at any moment to be appre- 
hended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of 
outline before the popular imagination. The ideal 
critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters 



140 • MATTHEW ARNOLD 

intellectual, moral, sesthetic, social; of perfect 
equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sym- 
pathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps com- 
prehensively the whole life of his time; who feels 
its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its 
most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his 
orientation towards the unchanging norms of human 
endeavour; and who is thus able to note and set 
forth the imperfections in existing types of human 
nature and to urge persuasively a return in essen- 
tial particulars to the normal type. The function 
of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal 
human type against perverting influences, and Ar- 
nold's prose-writings will for the most part be 
found to have been inspired in one form or another 
by a single purpose: the correction of excess in 
some human activity and the restoration of that 
activity to its proper place among the powers that 
make up the ideal human type. 

Culture and Anarchy (1869) was the first of 
Arnold's books to illustrate adequately this far- 
reaching conception of criticism. His special topic 
is, in this case, social conditions in England. Pol- 
iticians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal 
with social questions, are engrossed in practical 
matters and biassed by party considerations; they 
lack the detachment and breadth of view to see 
the questions at issue in their true relations to 
abstract standards of right and wrong. They mis- 
take means for ends, machinery for the results that 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 141 

machinery is meant to secure ; they lose all sense 
of values and exalt temporary measures into mat- 
ters of sacred import; finally, they come to that 
pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the 
enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable 
a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. What 
is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions 
is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic 
from his secure coign of vantage must examine 
social conditions dispassionately; he must deter- 
mine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives 
of the various classes of men around him, and so 
reveal the real sources of those social evils which 
politicians are trying to remedy by external re- 
adjustments and temporary measures. 

And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes 
in Culture and Anarchy. He sets himself to con- 
sider English society in its length and breadth 
with a view to discovering what is its essential 
constitution, what are the typical classes that enter 
into it, and what are the characteristics of these 
classes. So far as concerns classification he ulti- 
mately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his pur- 
pose, the traditional division of English society 
into upper, middle, and lower classes. But he 
then goes on to give an analysis of each of these 
classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest 
degree stimulating. He takes a typical member 
of each class and describes him in detail, intellectu- 
ally, morally, socially; he points out his sources 



142 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

of strength and his sources of weakness. He 
compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of 
human excellence, and notes wherein his powers 
"fall short or exceed." He indicates the reaction 
upon the social and political life of the nation of 
these various defects and excesses, their inevitable 
influence in producing social misadjustment and 
friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy 
that will correct these errant social types and bring 
them nearer to the perfect human type is culture, 
increase in vital knowledge. 

The details of Arnold's application of this con- 
ception of culture as a remedy for the social evils 
of the time, every reader may follow out for him- 
self in Culture and Anarchy. One point in Arnold's 
conception, however, is to be noted forthwith; it 
is a crucial point in its influence on his theoriz- 
ings. By culture Arnold means increase of know- 
ledge ; yes, but he means something more ; culture 
is for Arnold not merely an intellectual matter. 
Culture is the best knowledge made operative and 
dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must 
be vitalized ; it must be intimately conscious of the 
whole range of human interests; it must ulti- 
mately subserve the whole nature of man. Con- 
tinually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread 
of ideas, for increase of light, for the acceptance 
on the part of his fellow-countrymen of new know- 
ledge from the most diverse sources, he is as keenly 
alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectual- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 143 

ism. The undue development of the intellectual 
powers is as injurious to the individual as any 
other form of deviation from the perfect human 
type. 

This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ulti- 
mate ground of Arnold's hostility to the claims of 
Physical Science to primacy in modern education. 
His ideas on the relative educational value of the 
physical sciences and of the humanities are set 
forth in the well-known discourse on Literature and 
Science, Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, 
to accept the conclusions of science on all topics 
that fall within its range ; whatever its authenti- 
cated spokesmen have to say upon man's origin, 
his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his 
place in the physical universe, his religions, his 
sacred books — all these utterances are to be re- 
ceived with entire loyalty as far as they can be 
shown to embody the results of expert scientific 
observation and thought. But for Arnold, the 
great importance of modern scientific truth does 
not for a moment make clear the superiority of the 
physical sciences over the humanities as a means 
of educational discipline. The study of the sci- 
ences tends merely to intellectual development, to 
the increase of mental power; the study of litera- 
ture, on the other hand, trains a man emotionally 
and morally, develops his human sympathies, sen- 
sitizes him temperamentally, rouses his imagina- 
tion, and elicits his sense of beauty. Science puts 



144 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

before the student the crude facts of nature, bids 
him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of 
all discolouring moods as he watches the play 
of physical force, and convert himself into pure 
intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, 
to classify, and to systematize, and he is to go 
through these processes continually with facts 
that have no human quality, that come raw from 
the great whirl of the cosmic machine. As a dis- 
cipline, then, for the ordinary man, the study of 
science tends not a whit towards humanization, 
towards refinement, towards temperamental regen- 
eration ; it tends only to develop an accurate trick 
of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual 
strength. These powers are of very great impor- 
tance; but they may also be trained in the study 
of literature, while at the same time the student, 
as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being 
led and drawn "to as high a perfection as our 
degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodg- 
ings, can be capable of." Arnold, then, with 
characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the 
human type, urges the superior worth to most 
young men of a literary rather than a scientific 
training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit 
of man ; science ministers only to the intellect. 

The same insistent desire that culture be vital 
is at the root of Arnold's discomfort in the pres- 
ence of German scholarship. ¥ot the thorough- 
ness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 145 

he has great respect; but he cannot endure its 
trick of losing itself in the letter, its "pedantry, 
slowness," its way of "fumbling" after truth, its 
"ineffectiveness."^ "In the German mind," he 
exclaims in Literature and Dogma, " as in the Ger- 
man language, there does seem to be something 
splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelici- 
tous, — some positive want of straightforward, 
sure perception." 2 Of scholarship of this splay 
variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectu- 
ality and from lack of a delicate temperament and 
of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such 
scholarship he finds working its customary mis- 
chief in Professor Francis Newman's translation 
of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts 
of the lectures on Translating Homer to the illus- 
tration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he 
is bent on showing how inadequate is great learn- 
ing alone to cope with any nice literary problem. 
Newman's philological knowledge of Greek and of 
Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be 
judged from his assertion that Homer's verse, if 
we could hear the living Homer, would affect us 
"like an elegant and simple melody from an 
African of the Gold Coast." ^ The remedy for 
such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vital- 
ization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a 

1 Celtic Literature^ p. 75.^ 

2 Literature and Dogma, p. xxi. 
^ On Translating Homer, p. 295. 



146 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

mere kno^ver ; all his powers must be harmoniously 
developed. 

A last illustration of Arnold's insistence that 
knowledge be vital may be drawn from his writ- 
ings on religion aod theology. Again criticism 
and culture are the passwords that open the way 
to a new and better order of things. Formulas, 
Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrain- 
ingly upon the English religious mind. Tra- 
ditional interpretations of the Bible have come to 
be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations 
are really human inventions — the product of the 
ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and 
Luther. Yet they have so authenticated them- 
selves that for most readers to-day the Bible means 
solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological 
mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the 
Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a 
critical examination of what this book means for 
the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, 
as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympa- 
thetically and imaginatively; the moral inspira- 
tion the Bible has to offer, even to men who are 
rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and 
standards of historical truth, must be disengaged 
from what is unverifiable and transitory, and made 
real and persuasive. "I write," Arnold declares, 
" to convince the lover of religion that by following 
habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 147 

far as religion is concerned, lose anything. Tak- 
ing the Old Testament as Israel's magnificent 
establishment of the theme, Righteousness is salva- 
tion! taking the New as the perfect elucidation 
by Jesus of what righteousness is and how salva- 
tion is won, I do not fear comparing even the 
power over the soul and imagination of the Bible, 
taken in this sense, — a sense which is at the 
same time solid, — with the like power in the old 
materialistic and miraculous sense for the Bible, 
which is not."^ This definition of what Arnold 
hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented 
by a description of the method in which culture 
works towards the ends desired: "DiflRcult, cer- 
tainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and 
true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture 
implies not only knowledge, but right tact and 
justness of judgment, forming themselves by and 
with knowledge; without this tact it is not true 
culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is 
necessary. For, after all, the Bible is not a tal- 
isman, to be taken and used literally; neither is 
any existing church a talisman, whatever preten- 
sions of the sort it may make, for giving the right 
interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can 
give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, 
as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and 
the right interpretation of it, then the importance 
of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct is 

^ God and the Bible^ p. xxxiv. 



148 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), cult- 
ure is necessary/'^ 

In all these various ways, then, that have been 
illustrated, culture is a specific against the ills 
that society is heir to. Culture is vital know- 
ledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; 
culture and criticism work together for the preser- 
vation of the integrity of the human type against 
all the disasters that threaten it from the storm 
and stress of modern life. Politics, religion, schol- 
arship, science, each has its special danger for 
the individual ; each seizes upon him, subdues him 
relentlessly to the need of the moment and the re- 
quirements of some particular function, and con- 
verts him often into a mere distorted fragment of 
humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, 
against the specializing and materializing trend of 
modern life, criticism offers a powerful safeguard. 
Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal excel- 
lence, is continually disengaging, with fine dis- 
crimination, what is transitory and accidental from 
what is permanent and essential in all that man 
busies himself about, and is thus perpetually help- 
ing every individual to the apprehension of his 
"best self," to the development of what is real and 
absolute and the elimination of what is false or 
deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts 
as the appreciator of life; he is not the abstract 
thinker. He apprehends the ideal intuitively; 

1 Literature and Dogma , p. xxvii. 



MATTHEW" ARNOLD I49 

he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the 
imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not 
through a series of syllogisms 5 he is really a poet, 
rather than a philosopher. 

This conception of the nature and functions of 
criticism makes intelligible and justifies a phrase 
of Arnold's that has often been impugned — his 
description of poetry as a criticism of life. To 
this account of poetry it has been objected that 
criticism is an intellectual process, while poetry 
is primarily an affair of the imagination and the 
heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of 
life is to take a view of poetry that tends to convert 
it into mere rhetorical moralizing — the decorative 
expression in rhythmical language of abstract truth 
about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold's 
meaning becomes impossible, if the foregoing 
theory of criticism be borne in mind. Criticism is 
the determination and the representation of the 
archetypal, of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a de- 
termination of the archetypal formally and theo- 
retically, through speculation or the enumeration 
of abstract qualities; Arnold's disinclination for 
abstractions has been repeatedly noted. The pro- 
cess to be used in criticism is a vital process of 
appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the 
whole value of human life, to the appeal of art and 
of conduct and of manners as well as of abstract 
truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what 
is ideally best, and portrays this concretely and 



150 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

persuasively for the popular imagination. Such 
an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty in 
verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, 
will be a poet. In other words, the poet is the 
appreciator of human life who sees in it most 
sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what 
is archetypal, and evokes his vision before others 
through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense poetry 
can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life ; it is 
the winning portrayal of the ideal of human life 
as this ideal shapes itself in the mind of the poet. 
Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determina- 
tion and portrayal of what is ideally best in life 
according to mediaeval conceptions; a representa- 
tion of life in its integrity with a due adjustment 
of the claims of all the powers that enter into it — 
friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, 
artistic ardour, love. Such a criticism of life 
Shakespeare incidentally gives in terms of the full 
scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with 
due imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas 
of possible achievement and unlimited develop- 
ment that the new knowledge and the discoveries 
of the Eenaissance had opened. In short, the 
great poet is the typically sensitive, penetrative, 
and suggestive appreciator of life, — who calls to 
his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and 
persuasive as possible, as potent as possible over 
men's minds and hearts, all the emotional and 
imaginative resources of language, — rhythm, fig- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 151 

ures, allegory, symbolism, — whatever will enable 
him to impose his appreciation of life upon others 
and to insinuate into their souls his sense of the 
relative values of human acts and characters and 
passions; whatever will help him to make more 
overweeningly beautiful and insistently eloquent 
his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the 
poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, 
and poetry is the ultimate criticism of life — the 
finest portrayal each age can attain to of what 
seems to it in life most significant and delightful. 

IV 

The purpose with which Arnold writes is now 
fairly apparent. His aim is to shape in happy 
fashion the lives of his fellows ; to free them from 
the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes 
upon them; to enlarge their horizons, to enrich 
them spiritually, and to call all that is best within 
them into as vivid play as possible. When we 
turn to Arnold's literary criticism we shall find 
this purpose no less paramount. 

A glance through the volumes of Arnold's essays 
renders it clear that his selection of a poet or a 
prose-writer for discussion was usually made with 
a view to putting before English readers some 
desirable trait of character for their imitation, 
some temperamental excellence that they are lack- 
ing in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some 



152 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

habit of thought that they need to cultivate. Jou- 
bert is studied and portrayed because of his single- 
hearted love of light, the purity of his disinter- 
ested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his 
thought, and the freedom of his spirit from the 
sordid stains of worldly life. Heine is a typical 
leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy 
of Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable 
foe of prejudice and cant. Maurice and Eugenie 
de Guerin are winning examples of the spiritual 
distinction that modern Eomanism can induce in 
timely-happy souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon 
Milton and Goethe are painstakingly reproduced 
in the Mixed Essays, represents French critical 
intelligence in its best play — acute, yet compre- 
hensive; exacting, yet sympathetic; regardful of 
nuances and delicately refining, and yet virile and 
constructive. Of the importance for modern Eng- 
land of emphasis on all these qualities of mind and 
heart, Arnold was securely convinced. 

Moreover, even when his choice of subject is de- 
termined by other than moral considerations, his 
treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical 
bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for 
example, it is the substance of poetry that he is 
chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left 
with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet 
of joy in widest commonalty spread — the poet 
whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring 
and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, inse- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 153 

cure in his sense of worldly values, "a beautiful 
and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his lu- 
minous wings in vain."^ The essay on Heine 
helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the 
volatile beauty of Heine's songs, or to an intenser 
delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods 
in his verse. Erom the essay on George Sand, to 
be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the 
emotional and imaginative scope of French ro- 
mance ; for this essay was written con amove in the 
revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in 
an unusually heightened style ; the essay on Emer- 
son is the one study that has in places somewhat 
of the same lyrical intensity and the same vivid- 
ness of realization. Yet even in the essay on 
George Sand, the essayist is, on the whole, bent on 
revealing the temperament of the woman rather in 
its decisive influence on her theories of life than 
in its reaction upon her art as art. There is 
hardly a word of the Eomance as a definite literary 
form, of George Sand's relation to earlier French 
writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of 
work as a portray er of the great human spectacle. 
In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite 
modes of artistic expression, the technique of the 

1 This image may have been suggested by a sentence of 
Joubert's : " Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the 
play of his wings, one hears their rustle. ... It is good to 
breathe his air, but not to live upon him." The translation is 
Arnold's own. See his Jouhert, in Essays in Criticism, 1, 294. 



154 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from 
Arnold sliglit attention. 

Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold 
set himself, with some thoroughness, to the discus- 
sion of a purely literary problem was his series of 
lectures on Translating Homer. These lectures 
were produced before his sense of responsibility 
for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had 
become importunate, and were addressed to an 
academic audience. Por these reasons, the treat- 
ment of literary topics is more disinterested and 
less interrupted by practical considerations. In- 
deed, as will be presently noted in illustration of 
another aspect of Arnold's work, these lectures 
contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, 
show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to 
changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully 
the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism. 

Even in these exceptional lectures, however, 
Arnold's ethical interest asserts itself. In the 
course of them he gives an account of the grand 
style in poetry, — of that poetic manner that seems 
to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence ; 
and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner, 
— ■ of this grand style, — its moral power ; " it can 
form the character, ... is edifying, . . . can 
refine the raw natural man, . . . can transmute 
him."^ This definition of the grand style will be 
discussed presently in connection with Arnold's 

1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 197. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 155 

general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here 
that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold's 
mind between art and morals. 

His description of poetry as a criticism of life 
has already been mentioned. This doctrine is 
early implied in Arnold's writings, for example, 
in the passage just quoted from the lectures on 
Translating Homer ; it becomes more explicit in 
the Last Words, appended to these lectures, where 
the critic asserts that " the noble and profound ap- 
plication of ideas to life is the most essential part 
of poetic greatness."^ It is elaborated in the es- 
says on WordsKJorth (1879), on the Study of Poetry 
(1880), and on Byron (1881). "It is important, 
therefore," the essay on Wordsiuorth assures us, 
" to hold fast to this : that poetry is at bottom a 
criticism of life ; that the greatness of a poet lies 
in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas 
to life, — to the question: How to live."^ And 
in the essay on the Study of Poetry Arnold urges 
that " in poetry, as a criticism of life under the 
conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of 
poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our 
race will find, ... as time goes on and as other 
helps fail, its consolation and stay."^ 

With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection 
between the highest poetic excellence and essential 
nobleness of subject-matter probably only the most 

1 On Translating Horner^ ed. 1883, p. 295. 

2 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 143. 3 /^j^^.^ p. 5. 



156 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

irreconcilable advocates of art for art's sake would 
quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter 
Pater suggests a test of poetic "greatness" sub- 
stantially the same with Arnold's. "It is on the 
quality of the matter it informs or controls, its 
compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or 
the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of 
hope in it, that the greatness of literary art de- 
pends, as Tlie Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les 
Miserables, The English Bible, are great art." ^ 
This may be taken as merely a different phrasing 
of Arnold's principle that "the greatness of a poet 
lies in his powerful and beautiful application of 
ideas to life — to the question : How to live." 
Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any ob- 
jection to Arnold's general theory of poetry on the 
ground of its being, in its essence, over-ethical. 

There remains nevertheless the question of em- 
phasis. In the application to special cases of this 
test of essential worth, either the critic may be 
constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat 
restricted range of definite ideas about life, or even 
when he is fairly hospitable towards various moral 
idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethi- 
cal distinctions as to fail to give their due to the 
purely artistic qualities of poetry. It is in this 
latter way that Arnold is most apt to offend. The 
emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shel- 
ley, Byron, Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevail- 

1 Pater's Appreciations, ed. 1890, p. 36. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I57 

ingly on the ethical characteristics of each poet; 
and the reader carries away from an essay a vital 
conception of the play of moral energy and of spir- 
itual passion in the poet's verse rather than an im- 
pression of his peculiar adumbration of beauty, the 
characteristic rhythms of his imaginative move- 
ment, the delicate colour modulations on the sur- 
face of his image of life. 

It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold 
has specially admitted the incompleteness of his 
description of poetry as "a criticism of life"; this 
criticism, he has expressly added, must be made 
in conformity ''to the laws of poetic truth and 
poetic beauty." "The profound criticism of life" 
characteristic of " the few supreme masters " must 
exhibit itself " in indissoluble connection with the 
laws of poetic truth and beauty." ^ Is there, then, 
to be found in Arnold any account of certain laws 
the observance of which secures poetic beauty and 
truth? Is there any description of the special 
ways in which poetic beauty and truth manifest 
themselves, of the formal characteristics to be 
found in poetry where poetic beauty and truth are 
present? Does Arnold either suggest the methods 
the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or 
classify the various subordinate effects through 
which poetic beauty and truth invariably reveal 
their presence? The most apposite parts of his 
writings to search for some declaration on these 

1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187. 



158 MATTHEW AKNOLD 

points are the lectures on Translating Homer, and 
the second series of his essays which deal chiefly 
with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we 
ought to find a registration of beliefs as regards 
the precise nature and source of poetic beauty and 
truth. 

And indeed throughout all these writings, which 
run through a considerable period of time, Arnold 
makes fairly consistent use of a half-dozen cate- 
gories for his analyses of poetic effects. These 
categories are substance and matter, style and 
manner, diction and movement. Of the substance 
of really great poetry we learn repeatedly that it 
must be made up of ideas of profound significance 
"on man, on nature, and on human life."^ "This 
is, however, merely the prescription already so 
often noted that poetry, to reach the highest ex- 
cellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling 
criticism of life. In the essay on Byron, however, 
there is something formally added to this requisi- 
tion of "truth and seriousness of substance and 
matter " ; besides these, " felicity and perfection of 
diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the 
best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life 
made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth 
and poetic beauty." ^ /There must then be felicity 
and perfection of diction and manner in poetry of 
the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, 
but serve at least to guide us on our analytic way. 

1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 141. 2 jz^^vz., p. 187. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 159 

In the essay on the Study of Poetry, there is still 
farther progress made in the description of poetic 
excellence. " To the st3^1e and manner of the best 
poetry, their special character, their accent is given 
by their diction, and, even yet more, by their 
movement. And though we distinguish between 
the two characters, the two accents, of superi- 
ority" (i.e, between the superiority that comes 
from substance and the superiority that comes from 
style), "yet they are nevertheless vitally connected 
one with the other. The superior character of 
truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance 
of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superi- 
ority of diction and movement marking its style 
and manner. The two superiorities are closely 
related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the 
other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness 
are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, so 
far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp 
of diction and movement be wanting to his style 
and manner."^ 

Now that there is this intimate and necessary 
union between a poet's mode of conceiving life and 
his manner of poetic expression, is hardly disput- 
able. The image of life in a poet's mind is simply 
the outside world transformed by the complex of 
sensations and thoughts and emotions peculiar to 
the poet; and this image inevitably frames for it- 
self a visible and audible expression that delicately 

1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 22. 



160 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

utters its individual character — distils that char- 
acter subtly through word and sentence, rhythm 
and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and 
through their integration into a vital work of art. 
Moreover, the poet's style is itself in general the 
product of the same personality which determines 
his image of life, and must therefore be, like his 
image of life, delicately striated with the markings 
of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. The 
close correspondence, then, between the poet's sub- 
ject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. 
The part of Arnold's conclusion or the point in his 
method that is regrettable is the exclusive stress 
that he throws on this dependence of style upon 
worth of substance. He converts style into a mere 
function of the moral quality of a poet's thought 
about life, and fails to furnish any delicately stud- 
ied categories for the appreciation of poetic style 
apart from its moral implications. 

Take, for example, the judgments passed in the 
Study of Poetry upon various poets ; in every in- 
stance the estimate of the poet's style turns upon 
the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chau- 
cer whose right to be ranked as a classic is mooted? 
He cannot be ranked as a classic because ^Hhe 
substance of" his poetry has not "high serious- 
ness."^ Is it Burns whose relative rank is being 
fixed? Burns through lack of " absolute sincerity " 
falls short of "high seriousness," and, hence, is 

^Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 33. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 161 

not to be placed among the classics. And thus 
continually with Arnold, effects of style are 
merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains 
little insight into the refinements of poetical man- 
ner except as these derive directly from the poet's 
moral consciousness. The categories of style and 
manner, diction and movement, are everywhere 
subordinated to the categories of substance and 
matter, are treated as almost wholly derivative. 
"Felicity and perfection of diction and manner," 
wherever they are admittedly present, are usually 
explained as the direct result of the poet's lofty 
conception of life. Such a treatment of questions 
of style does not further us much on our way to a 
knowledge of the " laws of poetic beauty and poetic 
truth." 

Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses 
of style may be found in the lectures on Translat- 
ing Homer. These discussions do not reach very 
definite conclusions, but they at least consider 
poetic excellence as for the moment dependent on 
something else than the moral mood of the poet. 
For example, the grand style is analyzed into two 
varieties, the grand style in severity and the grand 
style in simplicity. Each of these styles is de- 
scribed and illustrated so that it enters into the 
reader's imagination and increases his sensitiveness 
to poetic excellence. Somewhat later in the lect- 
ures, the distinction between real simplicity in 
poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn 



162 MATTHEW AKNOLD 

with exquisite delicacy of appreciation. Through- 
out these passages, there is an effort to deal directly 
with artistic effects for their own sake and apart 
from their significance as expressive of ethos. Yet 
even here Arnold's ethical bias reveals itself in a 
tendency, while he is describing the moods back of 
these artistic qualities, to use words that have 
moral implications, and that suggest the issue of 
such moods in conduct. Self-restraint, proud 
gravity, are among the moods that are found back 
of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, 
super-subtle sophistication, account for Tennyson's 
simplesse. 

To bring together, then, the results of this some- 
what protracted analysis : Arnold ostensibly admits 
that poetry, to be of the highest excellence, must, 
in addition to containing a criticism of life of pro- 
found significance, conform to the laws of poetic 
beauty and truth. He accepts as necessary cate- 
gories, for the appreciation of poetical excellence, 
style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his 
most important general assertion about these latter 
purely formal determinations of poetry is that they 
are inseparably connected with substance and mat- 
ter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic ef- 
fects, he is apt to find them interesting simply as 
serving to interpret the artist's prevailing mood 
towards life ; and even where, as is at times doubt- 
less the case, he escapes for the moment from his 
ethical interest and appreciates with imaginative 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 163 

delicacy the individual quality of a poem or a 
poet's style, he is nearly always found sooner or 
later explaining this quality as originating in the 
poet's peculiar etlios. As for any systematic or 
even incidental study of "the laws of poetic 
beauty and truth," we search for it through his 
pages in vain. 

V 

But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold's 
essays to attribute their lack of theorizing about 
questions of art solely to his preoccupation with 
conduct. For theory in general and for abstrac- 
tions in general, — for all sorts of philosophizing, 
— Arnold openly professes his dislike. " Perhaps 
we shall one day learn," he says, in his essay on 
Wordsivorth, "to make this proposition general, 
and to say : Poetry is the reality, philosophy the 
illusion." Distrust of the abstract and of the 
purely theoretical shows itself throughout his 
literary criticism and determines many of its 
characteristics. 

His hostility to systems and to system-makers 
has already been pointed out; this hostility admits 
of no exception in favour of the systematic critic. 
"There is the judgment of ignorance, the judg- 
ment of incompatibility, the judgment of envy and 
jealousy. Finally, there is the systematic judg- 
ment, and this judgment is the most worthless of 
all. ... Its author has not really his eye upon 



164 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

the professed object of his criticism at all, but 
upon something else which he wants to prove by 
means of that object. He neither really tells us, 
therefore, anything about the object, nor anything 
about his own ignorance of the object. He never 
fairly looks at it; he is looking at something 
else." ^ This hypnotizing effect that a preconceived 
theory exerts on a critic, is Arnold's first reason 
for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic 
with a theory is bound to find what he goes in 
search of, and nothing else. He goes out — to 
change somewhat one of Arnold's own figures — 
like Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father's 
asses ; and he comes back with the authentic animals 
instead of the traditional windfall of a kingdom. 

Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole 
incapacity that Arnold finds in the systematic 
critic; such a critic is almost sure to be over-intel- 
lectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions, 
dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and 
lacking in temperamental sensitiveness to the ap- 
peal of literature as art. He is merely a triangu- 
lator of the landscape of literature, and moves 
resolutely in his process of triangulation from one 
fixed point to another; he finds significant only 
such parts of his literary experience as he can sum 
up in a definite abstract formula at some one of 
these arbitrary halting-places ; his ultimate opinion 
of the ground he covers is merely the sum total of 

1 Mixed Essaijs, ed. 1883, p. 209. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 165 

a comparatively small number of such abstract ex- 
pressions. To the manifold wealth of the land- 
scape in colour, in light, in shade, and in poetic 
suggestiveness, the system-monger, the theoretical 
critic, has all the time been blind. 

Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely 
systematized, may interfere with the free play of 
critical intelligence. An oversupply of unvitalized 
facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be 
not organized into an importunate theory, may 
prove disastrous to the critic. This danger Arnold 
has amusingly set forth in his Last Words on 
Homeric translation : " Much as Mr. Newman was 
mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is en- 
tirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And 
yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes 
find myself wishing, when dealing with these mat- 
ters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were 
even greater than it is. To handle these matters 
properly, there is needed a poise so perfect that the 
least overweight in any direction tends to destroy 
the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet de- 
stroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press 
to the sense of the thing with which one is dealing, 
not to go off on some collateral issue about the 
thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The 
Hhing itself with which one is here dealing — 
the critical perception of poetic truth — is of all 
things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; 
by even pressing too impetuously after it, one 



166 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry 
should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, 
the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imagi- 
nable; he should be, indeed, the 'ondoyant et 
divers, ' the undulating and diverse being of Mon- 
taigne. The less he can deal with his object sim- 
ply and freely, the more things he has to take into 
account in dealing with it, — the more, in short, 
he has to encumber himself, — so much the greater 
force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. 
But one cannot exactly have this greater force by 
wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has, 
the load put upon it is often heavier than it will 
well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of 
a certain peer that 'it was a great pity his educa- 
tion had been so far too much for his abilities.' In 
like manner one often sees erudition out of all pro- 
portion to its owner's critical faculty. Little as 
I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in 
dealing with poetry, lest even that little should 
prove too much for my abilities." ^ 

Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold's counsel of 
perfection to the would-be critic. And, accord- 
ingly, he himself is desultory from conscientious 
motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There 
are two passages in his writings where he explains 
confidentially his methods and his reasons for 
choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864 : 
" My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceed- 

1 On Translating Homer, p. 245. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 167 

ing has been adopted by me, first, because I really 
think it the best way of proceeding, if one wants to 
get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I 
am convinced only by a literary form of this kind 
being given to them can ideas such as mine ever 
gain any access in a country such as ours." ^ The 
second passage occurs in the Preface to his first 
series of Essays in Criticism (1865) : " Indeed, it 
is not in my nature — some of my critics would 
rather say not in my power — to dispute on behalf 
of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. 
To try and approach truth on one side after an- 
other, not to strive or cry, not to persist in press- 
ing forward, on any one side, with violence and 
self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mor- 
tals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious 
goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. 
He who will do nothing but fight impetuously 
towards her, on his own one favourite particular 
line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the 
folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped." ^ 
Such, then, is Arnold's ideal of critical method. 
The critic is not to move from logical point to 
point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was wont, 
in his essays, to move, with an advocate's devotion 
to system and desire to make good some definite 
conclusion. Eather he is to give rein to his tem- 
perament; he is to make use of intuitions, imagi- 
nations, hints that touch the heart, as well as 

1 Letters, I, 282. 2 jEssays, ed. 1891, I, p. v. 



168 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

abstract principles, syllogisms, and arguments; 
and so lie is to reach out tentatively through all 
his powers after truth if haply he may find her ; in 
the hope that thus, keeping close to the concrete 
aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more 
inclusive and intimate command of its surface and 
configurations. The type of mind most apt for 
this kind of critical work is the " free, flexible, and 
elastic spirit," described in the passage just quoted 
from the Last Words; the "undulating and diverse 
being of Montaigne." 

A critic of this type will palpably concern him- 
self slightly with abstractions, with theorizings, 
with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold's unwill- 
ingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. 
"Nothing has raised more questioning among my 
critics than these words — 7iohle^ the grand style. 
. . . Alas ! the grand style is the last matter in 
the world for verbal definition to deal with ade- 
quately. One may say of it as is said of faith : 
* One must feel it in order to know it. ' " ^ Similarly 
in the Study of Poetry, Arnold urges : " Critics give 
themselves great labour to draw out what in the 
abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality 
of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to 
concrete examples. ... If we are asked to define 
this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer 
must be : No, for we should thereby be darkening 
the question, not clearing it." Again : " I may dis- 

1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 264. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 169 

CUSS what in the abstract constitutes the grand 
style; but that sort of general discussion never 
much helps our judgment of particular instances." ^ 
These passages are characteristic; rarely indeed 
does Arnold consent to commit himself to the con- 
trol of a definition. He prefers to convey into his 
readers' mind a living realization of the thing or 
the object he treats of rather than to put before 
them its logically articulated outlines. 

Moreover, when he undertakes the abstract dis- 
cussion of a general term, he is apt to be capricious 
in his treatment of it and to follow in his sub- 
divisions and classifications some external clue 
rather than logical structure. In the essay on 
Celtic Literatui'e he discusses the various ways of 
handling nature in poetry, and finds four such 
ways — the conventional way, the faithful way, 
the Greek way, and the magical way. The classi- 
fication recommends itself through its superficial 
charm and facility, yet rests on no psychological 
truth, or at any rate carries with it, as Arnold 
treats it, no psychological suggestions ; it gives no 
swift insight into the origin in the poet's mind and 
heart of these different modes of conceiving of 
nature. Hence the classification, as Arnold uses it, 
is merely a temporary makeshift for rather grace- 
fully grouping effects, not an analj^tic interpre- 
tation of these effects through a reduction of them 
to their varying sources in thought and feeling. 

1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 194. 



170 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

This may be taken as typical of Arnold's critical 
methods. As we read his essays we have little 
sense of making definite progress in the compre- 
hension of literature as an art among arts, as well 
as in the appreciation of an individual author or 
poem. We are not being intellectually oriented, 
as in reading the most stimulating critical work; 
we are not getting an ever-surer sense of the points 
of the compass. Essays, to have this orienting 
power, need not be continually prating of theories 
and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in 
phrase or in method. But they must issue from a 
mind that has come to an understanding with itself 
about the genesis of art in the genius of the artist; 
about the laws that, when the utmost plea has 
been made for freedom and caprice, regulate ar- 
tistic production; about the history and evolution 
of art forms; and about the relations of the arts 
among themselves and to the other activities of life. 
It may fairly be doubted if Arnold had ever wrought 
out for himself consistent conclusions on all or 
most of these topics. Indeed, the mere mention 
of his name in connection with such a formal list 
of topics suggests the kind of mock-serious depre- 
catory paragraph with which the " unlearned bellet- 
tristic trifler'' was wont to reply to charges of 
dilettantism — a pa.ragraph sure to carry in its tail 
a stinging bit of sarcasm at the expense of pedantry 
and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as 
must be every one's respect for the thorough schol- 



MATTHEW AKNOLD 171 

arship and widely varied accomplishment that Ar- 
nold made so light of and carried off so easily, the 
doubt must nevertheless remain whether a firmer 
grasp on theory, and a more consistent habit of 
thinking out literary questions to their principles, 
would not have invigorated his work as a critic 
and given it greater permanence and richer sug- 
gestiveness. 

VI 

It is, then, as an appreciator of what may per- 
haps be called the spiritual qualities of literature 
that Arnold is most distinctively a furtherer of 
criticism. An appreciator of beauty, — of true 
beauty wherever found, — that is what he would 
willingly be; and yet, as the matter turns out, the 
beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has 
invariably a spiritual aroma, — is the finer breath 
of intense spiritual life. Or, if spiritual be too 
mystical a word to apply to Homer and Goethe, 
perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appre- 
ciator of such beauty in literature as carries with 
it an inevitable suggestion of elevation and noble- 
ness of character in the author. 

The importance of appreciation in criticism Ar- 
nold has described in one of the Mixed Essays: 
"Admiration is salutary and formative; . . . but 
things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gath- 
ered here and gathered there, not all in one place ; 
and until we have gathered them wherever they are 



172 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

to be found, we have not known the true salutari- 
ness and formativeness of admiration. The quest 
is large ; and occupation with the unsound or half- 
sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a 
sore let and hindrance to us. Eelease from such 
occupation and delight sets us free for ranging far- 
ther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He 
is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with 
the love of nothing which is not beautiful, is able 
to embrace the greatest number of things beautiful 
in his life." 1 

On this disinterested quest, then, for the beauti- 
ful, Arnold in his essays nominally fares forth. 
Yet certain limitations in his appreciation, over 
and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must 
at once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpt- 
ure have seemingly nothing to say to him. In his 
Letters there are only a few allusions to any of 
these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in sig- 
nificance the comments of the chance loiterer in 
foreign galleries or visitor of concert rooms. In 
his essays there are none of the correlations be- 
tween the effects and methods of literature and 
those of kindred arts that may do so much either 
to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics 
of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem 
to make up the whole range of art. 

Within these limits, however, — the limits im- 
posed by preoccupation with conduct and by care- 

1 Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 210. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I73 

lessness of all arts except literature, — Arnold has 
been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not bis 
most hostile critic can question the delicacy of his 
perception, so far as he allows his perception free 
play. On the need of nice and ever nicer dis- 
criminations in the apprehension of the shifting 
values of literature, he has himself often insisted. 
Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert them- 
selves turbulently, to the destruction of fine dis- 
tinctions, always fall under Arnold's condemnation. 
" When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no 
pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike 
closely or to express it moderately; he does not 
mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way. 
. . . He dislikes the architecture of the Kue 
Eivoli, and he puts it on the level with the archi- 
tecture of Belgravia and Gower Street; he lumps 
them all together in one condemnation; he loses 
sight of the shade, the distinction which is here 
everything." For a similar blurring of impres- 
sions. Professor Newman is taken to task, though 
in Newman's case the faulty appreciations are due 
to a different cause : " Like all learned men, accus- 
tomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclu- 
sions too absolutely; he wants to include too much 
under his rules ; he does not quite perceive that in 
poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, 
is everything; and that, when he has once missed 
this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the 
air." Here, again, what Arnold pleads for is tem- 



174 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

peramental sensitivenesSj delicacy of perception. 
To appreciate literature more and more sensitively 
in terms of " an undulating and diverse tempera- 
ment, " this is the ideal that he puts before literary 
criticism. 

His own appreciations of poetry are probably 
richest, most discriminating, and most disinter- 
ested in the lectures on Translating Homer. The 
imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders 
the contour and the subject-qualities of the various 
poems that he comments on; and equally note- 
worthy is the divining instinct with which he capt- 
ures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us 
with a phrase or a symbol. The " inversion and 
pregnant conciseness'^ of Milton's style, its "la- 
borious and condensed fulness"; the plainspoken- 
ness, freshness, vigorousness, and yet fancifulness 
and curious complexity of Chapman's style; Spen- 
ser's "sweet and easy slipping movement"; Scott's 
" bastard epic style " ; the " one continual falsetto " 
of Macaulay's "pinchbeck Roman Ballads,^^ — all 
these characterizations are delicately sure in their 
phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because 
the various styles are made to stand in continual 
contrast with Homer's style, the rapidity, direct- 
ness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold 
keeps ever present in our consciousness. Inci- 
dentally, too, such suggestive discriminations as 
that between simplesse and simplicite, the "sem- 
blance" of simplicity and the "real quality," are 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 175 

wrought out for the reader as the critic goes on 
with his pursuit of the essential qualities of 
Homeric thought and diction. To read these lect- 
ures is a thoroughly tempering process ; a process 
that renders the mind and imagination permanently 
finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively sure 
in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of 
good art. 

The essay on the Study of Poetry, which was 
written as preface to Ward's English Poets, is also 
rich in appreciation, and at times almost as disin- 
terested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps 
never quite so disinterested. Por in the Study of 
Poetry Arnold is persistently aware of his concep- 
tion of ^' the grand style '' and bent on winning his 
readers to make it their own. Only poets who 
attain this grand style deserve to be "classics," 
and the continual insistence on the note of " high 
seriousness" — its presence or absence — becomes 
rather wearisome. Moreover, Arnold's preoccupa- 
tion with this ultimate manner and quality tends 
to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his ap- 
preciations of other manners and minor qualities. 
At times, one is tempted to charge Arnold with 
some of the unresponsiveness of temperament that 
he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even 
Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed 
idea. Yet, when all is said, the Study of Poetry 
is full of fine things, and does much to widen the 
range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to 



176 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

make appreciation more certain. "The liquid dic- 
tion, the fluid movement of Chaucer, his large, free, 
sound representation of things " ; Burns's " touches 
of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos," 
his "archness," too, and his "soundness"; Shel- 
ley, "that beautiful spirit building his many -col- 
oured haze of words and images 'Pinnacled dim in 
the intense inane ' " j these, and other interpreta- 
tions like them, are easily adequate and carry the 
qualities of each poet readily into the minds and 
imaginations of sympathetic readers. Apprecia- 
tion is much the richer for this essay on the Study 
of Poetry. 

Nor must Arnold's suggestive appreciations of 
prose style be forgotten. Several of them have 
passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized 
varieties of prose diction. Arnold's phrasing of 
the matter has made all sensitive English readers 
permanently more sensitive to "the warm glow, 
blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life " of the 
Attic style, and also permanently more hostile to 
" the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait " of 
the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of 
the Corinthian style: "It has glitter without 
warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness with- 
out charm. Its characteristic is that it has no 
soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make 
its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, 
to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the ex- 
pense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I77 

little studious of tlie charm of tlie great models; 
so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be 
said to have the note of provinciality." ^ " Middle- 
class Macaulayese '' is his name for Hepworth 
Dixon's style; a style which he evidently regards 
as likely to gain favour and establish itself. " I 
call it Macaulayese . . . because it has the same 
internal and external characteristics as Macaulay's 
style; the external characteristic being a hard, 
metallic movement with nothing of the soft play 
of life, and the internal characteristic being a per- 
petual semblance of hitting the right nail on the 
head without the reality. And I call it middle- 
class Macaulayese, because it has these faults 
without the compensation of great studies and of 
conversance with great affairs, by which Macaulay 
partly redeemed them."^ It will, of course, be 
noted that these latter appreciations deal for the 
most part with divergences from the beautiful in 
style, but they none the less quicken and refine the 
aesthetic sense. 

Finally, throughout the two series of miscellane- 
ous essays there is, in the midst of much business 
with ethical matters, an often-recurring free play 
of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, 
of beauty. Many are the happy windfalls these 
essays offer of delicate interpretation both of poetic 
effect and of creative movement, and many are 

1 Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. 75. 

2 Friendship:)' s Garland, ed. 1883, p. 279. 

N 



178 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

the memorable phrases and symbols by which 
incidentally the essential quality of a poet or 
prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader's 
consciousness. 

And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive 
as are Arnold's appreciations, the feeling will as- 
sert itself, in a final survey of his work in literary 
criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his 
readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. 
The end in view is the exorcism of the spirit of 
Philistinism. Arnold's conscience is haunted by 
this hideous apparition as Luther's was by the 
devil, and he is all the time metaphorically throw- 
ing his inkstand at the spectre. Or, to put the 
matter in another way, his one dominating wish is 
to help modern Englishmen to "conquer the hard 
unintelligence " which is "their bane; to supple 
and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, 
fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life " ; and 
the appreciative interpretation of literature to as 
wide a circle of readers as possible seems to him 
one of the surest ways of thus educing in his fel- 
low-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must 
not be forgotten that Matthew Arnold was the son 
of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is in 
him a hereditary pedagogic bias — an inevitable 
trend towards moral suasion. The pedagogic spirit 
has suffered a sea-change into something rich and 
strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it. 
Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irre- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I79 

sponsible; it is our sclioolmaster to bring us to 
culture. 

In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great 
transformation which " in this concluding half of 
the century the English spirit is destined to un- 
dergo." "I shall do," he adds, "what I can for 
this movement in literature ; freer perhaps in that 
sphere than I could be in any other, but with the 
risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild 
beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert 
him, of being torn in pieces by him." ^ In charming 
the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and 
yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his 
very success. The presence of the beast, and the 
necessity of fluting to him debonairly and win- 
ningly, fastened themselves on Arnold's imagina- 
tion, and subdued him to a comparatively narrow 
range of subjects and set of interests. From the 
point of view, at least, of what is desirable in ap- 
preciative criticism, Arnold was injured by his 
sense of responsibility; he lacks the detachment 
and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming 
traits of modern dilettantism. 

If, then, we regard Arnold as a writer with a 
task to accomplish, with certain definite regenera- 
tive purposes to carry out, with a body of original 
ideas about the conduct of life to inculcate, we 
must conclude that he succeeded admirably in his 
work, followed out his ideas with persistence and 

1 Letters, I, 240. 



180 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

temerity through many regions of human activity, 
and embodied them with unwearying ingenuity and 
persuasiveness in a wide range of discussions. If, 
on the other hand, we consider him solely as a lit- 
erary critic, we are forced to admit that he is not 
the ideal literary critic ; he is not the ideal literary 
critic because he is so much more, and because his 
interests lie so decisively outside of art. Nor is 
this opinion meant to imply an ultimate theory of 
art for art's sake, or to suggest any limitation of 
criticism to mere impressionism or appreciation. 
Literature must be known historically and philo- 
sophically before it can be adequately appreciated ; 
that is emphatically true. Art may or may not be 
justifiable solely as it is of service to society; that 
need not be debated. But, in any event, literary 
criticism, if it is to reach its utmost effectiveness, 
must regard works of art for the time being as 
self-justified integrations of beauty and truth, 
and so regarding them must record and interpret 
their power and their charm. And this temporary 
isolating process is just the process which Arnold 
very rarely, for the reasons that have been traced 
in detail, is willing or able to go through with. 



VII 

When we turn to consider Arnold's literary 
style, we are forced to admit that this, too, has 
suffered from the strenuousness of his moral pur- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 181 

pose; it has been unduly sophisticated, here and 
there, because of his desire to charm "the wikl 
beast of Philistinism." To this purpose and this 
desire is owing, at least in part, that falsetto note 
— that half -querulous, half -supercilious artifici- 
ality of tone — which is now and then to be heard 
in his writing. To exaggerate the extent to which 
this note is audible would doubtless be easy; an 
unprejudiced reader will find long continuous pas- 
sages of even Arnold's most elaborately designed 
writing free from any trace of undue self-con- 
sciousness or of gentle condescension. And yet it 
is undeniable that when, apart from his Letters, 
Arnold's prose, as a whole, is compared with that 
of such a writer, for example, as Cardinal New- 
man, there is in Arnold's style, as the ear listens 
for the quality of the bell-metal, not quite the 
same beautifully clear and sincere resonance. 
There seems to be, now and then, some unhappy 
warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of over- 
tones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting. 

Are not these defects in Arnold's style due to 
his somewhat self-conscious attempt to fascinate a 
recalcitrant public? Is it not the assumption of 
a manner that jars on us often in Arnold's less 
happy moments? Has he not the pose of the man 
who overdoes bravado with the hope of getting 
cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying 
to his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness 
of the very stupid beast of Philistinism lying in 



182 MATTHEW AKNOLD 

wait for him ; and in the stress of the moment he 
is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is 
just a shade unnatural in his flippancy; he treads 
his measure with an unduly mincing flourish. 

Arnold's habit of half -mocking self-depreciation 
and of insincere apology for supposititious personal 
shortcomings has already been mentioned; to his 
controversial writings, particularly, it gives often 
a raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with 
mock humbleness that he is a "mere bellettristic 
trifler"; that he has no "system of philosophy 
with principles coherent, interdependent, subor- 
dinate, and derivative " to help him in the discus- 
sion of abstract questions. He assures us that he 
is merely " a feeble unit " of the " English middle 
class"; he deprecates being called a professor 
because it is a title he shares " with so many dis- 
tinguished men — Professor Pepper, Professor An- 
derson, Professor Frickel, and others — who adorn 
it," he feels, much more than he does. These 
mock apologies are always amusing and yet a bit 
exasperating too. Why should Arnold regard it, 
we ask ourselves, as such a relishing joke — the 
possibility that he has a defect? The implication 
of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is trouble- 
somely present to us. Such passages certainly 
suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt 
for the "beast" he was charmiug. 

Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious 
satire is irresistibly droll, and refuses to be gain- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 183 

said. One of his most effective modes of ridiculing 
his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary- 
scenes in which some ludicrous aspect of his oppo- 
nent's case or character is thrown into diverting 
prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant self-sat- 
isfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman 
that Arnold wishes to satirize? And more par- 
ticularly is it the futility of the Saturday Beview 
in holding up Benthamism — the systematic recog- 
nition of such a smug man's ideal of selfish happi- 
ness — as the true moral ideal? Arnold represents 
himself as travelling on a suburban railway on 
which a murder has recently been committed, and 
as falling into chat with the middle-class frequent- 
ers of this route. The demoralization of these 
worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was "something 
bewildering." "Myself a transcendentalist (as 
the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infec- 
tion ; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated 
fellow-travellers with all the consolations which 
my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to 
me. I reminded them how Caesar refused to take 
precautions against assassination, because life was 
not worth having at the price of an ignoble solici- 
tude for it. I reminded them what insignificant 
atoms we all are in the life of the world. 'Sup- 
pose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing a 
portly jeweller from Cheapside; 'suppose even 
yourself to be the victim; il n^y a pas d^liomme 
n4cessaire. We should miss you for a day or two 



184 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

upon the Woodford Branch ; but the great mundane 
movement would still go on, the gravel walks of 
your villa would still be rolled, dividends would 
still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still 
run, there would still be the old crush at the corner 
of Fenchurch Street. ' All was of no avail. jSToth- 
ing could moderate in the bosom of the great Eng- 
lish middle class, their passionate, absorbing, 
almost bloodthirsty clinging to life." This is, of 
course, "admirable fooling"; and equally, of 
course, the little imaginary scene serves perfectly 
the purposes of Arnold's argument and turns into 
ridicule the narrowness and overweening self- 
importance of the smug tradesman. 

Another instance of Arnold's ability to conjure 
up fancifully a scene of satirical import may be ad- 
duced from the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy. 
Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere 
"bodily health and vigour" as ends in themselves. 
"Why, one has heard people," he exclaims, "fresh 
from reading certain articles of the Times on the 
Kegistrar General's returns of marriages and births 
in this country, who would talk of our large English 
families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had 
something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meri- 
torious in them; as if the British Philistine would 
have only to present himself before the Great Judge 
with his twelve children, in order to be received 
among the sheep as a matter of right ! " 

It is a fact worth remarking that in his prose 



MATTHEW AENOLD 185 

Arnold's imagination seems naturally to call up 
and visualize only such scenes as those that have 
just been quoted — scenes that are satirically and 
even maliciously suggestive; scenes, on the other 
hand, that have the limpid light and the winning 
quality of many in Cardinal Newman's writings 
— scenes that rest the eye and commend them- 
selves simply and graciously to the heart — are in 
Arnold's prose rarely, if ever, to be found. This 
seems the less easy to explain inasmuch as his 
poetry, though of course not exceptionally rich in 
colour, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately 
sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only 
the large sweep of the earth-areas or the diversified 
play of the human spectacle that is absent from 
Arnold's prose; his imagination does not even 
make itself exceptionally felt through concrete 
phrasing or warmth of colouring; his style is usu- 
ally intellectual almost to the point of wanness, 
and has rarely any of the heightened quality of 
so-called poetic prose. In point of fact, this con- 
ventional restraint in Arnold's style, this careful 
adherence to the mood of prose, is a very signifi- 
cant matter; it distinguishes Arnold both as writer 
and as critic of life from such men as Carlyle and 
Mr. Euskin. The meaning of this quietly conven- 
tional manner will be later considered in the dis- 
cussion of Arnold's relation to his age. 

The two pieces of writing where Arnold's style 
has most fervour and imaginative glow are the 



186 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

essay on George Sand and the discourse on Emer- 
son. In each case he was returning in the choice 
of his subject to an earlier enthusiasm, and was 
reviving a mood that had for him a certain roman- 
tic consecration. George Sand had opened for 
him, while he was still at the University, a whole 
world of rich and half-fearful imaginative experi- 
ence; a world where he had delighted to follow 
through glowing southern landscapes the journey- 
ings of picturesquely rebellious heroes and heroines, 
whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible 
spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal 
of rustic nature had also come to him as something 
graciously different from the sterner and more 
moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be 
found in Wordsworth's poems. Her personality, in 
all its passionate sincerity and with its pathetically 
unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on Ar- 
nold's imagination both as this personality was 
revealed in her books and as it was afterward en- 
countered in actual life. All these early feelings 
Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, 
one year after George Sand's death. From first 
to last the essay has a brooding sincerity of tone, 
an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and 
colour of phrase that are noteworthy. The descrip- 
tions of nature, both of the landscapes to be found 
in George Sand's romances and of those in the 
midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance 
and sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely con- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 187 

descends to. The tone of unguarded devotion may- 
be represented by part of the concluding paragraph 
of the essay: "It is silent, that eloquent voice! 
it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! We 
sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and 
we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many 
lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets con- 
verge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. 
Let them be joined by these words of sad homage 
from one of a nation which she esteemed, and 
which knew her very little and very ill." There 
can be no question of the passionate sincerity and 
the poetic beauty of this passage. 

Comparable in atmosphere and tone to this essay 
on George Sand is the discourse on Emerson, in 
certain parts of which Arnold again has the cour- 
age of his emotions. In the earlier paragraphs 
there is the same revivification of a youthful mood 
as in the essay on George Sand. There is also the 
same only half -restrained pulsation in the rhythm, 
an emotional throb that at times almost produces 
an effect of metre. " Forty years ago, when I was 
an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air 
there which haunt my memory still. Happy the 
man who in that susceptible season of youth hears 
such voices! they are a possession to him forever." 
Of this discourse, however, only the introduction 
and the conclusion are of this intense, self-com- 
muning passionateness ; the analysis of Emerson's 
qualities as writer and thinker, that makes up the 



188 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

greater part of the discourse, has Arnold's usual 
colloquial, self-consciously wary tone. 

A fairly complete survey of the characteristics 
of Arnold's style may perhaps best be obtained 
by recognizing in his prose-writings four distinct 
manners. First may be mentioned his least com- 
promising, severest, most exact style; it is most 
consistently present in the first of the Mixed Es- 
says, that on Democracy (1861). The sentences are 
apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the 
thought is defined by means of painstakingly accu- 
rate articulations. Progress in the discussion is 
systematic and is from time to time conscientiously 
noted. The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A 
strenuous, systematic, responsible style, we may 
call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities, 
somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style 
of Arnold's technical reports upon education and 
of great portions of his writings on religious topics. 
It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the 
essay on Democracy. 

Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more 
casual, is the style that Arnold uses in his literary 
essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the lectures 
on Translating Homer, and in Culture and Anarchy. 
This style is characterized by its admirable union 
of ease, simplicity, and strength; by the affability 
of its tone, an affability, however, that never degen- 
erates into over-familiarity or loses dignified re- 
straint ; by its disregard of method, or of the more 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 189 

pretentious manifestations of method ; and by the 
delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it 
takes the reader, despite its apparently casual 
movement, over the essential aspects of the subject 
under discussion. This is really Arnold's most 
distinctive manner, and it will require, after his 
two remaining manners have been briefly noted, 
some further analysis. 

Arnold's third style is most apt to appear in 
controversial writings or in his treatment of sub- 
jects where he is particularly aware of his enemy, 
or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the 
inattentive through cleverly malicious satire, or 
particularly desirous of carrying things off with a 
nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial 
parts of the lectures on Translating Homerj in 
many chapters of Culture and Anarchy, and runs 
throughout Friendship's Garland. Its peculiarly 
rasping effect upon many readers has already been 
described. It is responsible for much of the prej- 
udice against Arnold's prose. 

Arnold's fourth style — intimate, rich in colour, 
intense in feeling, almost lyrical in tone — is the 
style that has just been noted as appearing in the 
essays on George Sand and on Emerson. There are 
not many passages in Arnold's prose where this 
style has its way with him. But these passages 
are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with 
such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades 
them deserves to be put by itself. 



190 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

The style usually taken as characteristically Ar- 
nold's is that here classed as his second, with a 
generous admixture of the third. Many of the 
qualities of this style have already been suggested 
as illustrative of certain aspects of Arnold's tem- 
perament or habits of thought. Various important 
points, however, still remain to be appreciated. 

Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style 
surely is. It is fond of assenting to its own prop- 
ositions; "well" and "yes" often begin its sen: 
tences — signs of its casual and tentative mode of 
advance. Arnold's frequent use of "well" and 
" yes " and neglect of the anxiously demonstrative 
"now," at the opening of his sentences, mark un- 
mistakably the unrigorousness of his method. An 
easily negligent treatment of the sentence, too, is 
often noticeable ; a subject is left suspended while 
phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows 
clause, until, quite as in ordinary talk, the subject 
must be repeated, the beginning of the sentence 
must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold 
ends a sentence and begins the next with the same 
word or phrase ; this trick is better suited to talk 
than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits 
himself not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day 
speech. He uses the cleft infinitive ; he introduces 
relative clauses with superfluous " and " or " but " ; 
he confuses the present participle with the verbal 
noun and speaks, for example, of "the creating a 
current " ; and he usually " tries and does " a thing 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 191 

instead of "trying to do" it. Finally, his prose 
abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or 
phrases, and so takes on much of the movement 
and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage: 
"But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. 
^Let us return to Nature ! ' And all the world 
salutes with pride and joy the Renascence, and 
prays to Heaven: 'Oh, that Ishmael might live 
before thee ! ' Surely the future belongs to this 
brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim: 
Let us return to Nature! Ah, what pitfalls are 
in that word Nature! Let us return to art and 
science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let 
us return to a proper conception of righteousness, 
to a true sense of the method and secret of Jesus, 
which have been all denaturalized; yes. But, 
'Let us return to Nature !^ — do you mean that we 
are to give full swing to our inclinations? '^^ The 
colloquial character of these exclamations and the 
search, through the use of italics, for stress like 
the accent of speech are unmistakable. 

Arnold's fundamental reason, conscious or un- 
conscious, for the adoption of this colloquial tone 
and manner, may probably be found in the account 
of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given 
near the close of Culture and Anarchy ; he aims, 
not to inculcate an absolutely determinate system 
of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest 
possible self-questioning over the worth of their 

1 Literature and Dogma, ed. 1893, p. 321. 



192 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

stock ideas. " Socrates has drunk his hemlock and 
is dead; but in his own breast does not every man 
carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that 
power of disinterested play of consciousness upon 
his stock notions and habits, of which this wise 
and admirable man gave all through his lifetime 
the great example, and which was the secret of his 
incomparable influence? And he who leads men to 
call foTth and exercise in themselves this power, 
and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in 
himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as 
Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the 
vital working of men's minds, and more effectually 
significant, than any House of Commons' orator, 
or practical operator in politics."^ This dialec- 
tical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best induced 
and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of 
writing that he usually adopts. 

In the choice of words, however, Arnold is not 
noticeably colloquial. Less often in Arnold than 
in Newman is a familiar phrase caught audaciously 
from common speech and set with a sure sense of 
fitness and a vivifying effect in the midst of more 
formal expressions. His style, though idiomatic, 
stops short of the vocabulary of everyday; it is 
nice — instinctively edited. Certain words are 
favourites with him, and, as is so often the case 
with the literary temperament, reveal special pre- 
occupations. Such words are lucidity ^ urbanity , 

1 Culture and Anarchy^ ed. 1883, p. 205. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I93 

amenity, fluid (as an epithet for style), vital, 
puissant, 

Arnold is never afraid of repeating a word or a 
phrase, hardly enough afraid of this. His trick of 
ending one sentence and beginning the next with 
the same set of words has already been noted. At 
times, his repetitions seem due to his attempt to 
write down to his public; he will not confuse them 
by making them grasp the same idea twice through 
two different forms of speech. Often, his repeti- 
tions come palpably from sheer fondness for his 
own happy phraseology. His description of Shel- 
ley as " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating 
in the void his luminous wings in vain," pleases 
him so well that he carries it over entire from one 
essay to another; even a whole page of his writing 
is sometimes so transferred. 

And indeed iteration and reiteration of single 
phrases or forms of words is a mannerism with 
Arnold, and at times proves one of his most effec- 
tive means both for stamping his own ideas on the 
mind of the public and for ridiculing his oppo- 
nents. Many of his positive formulas have become 
part and parcel of the modern literary man's equip- 
ment. His account of poetry as "a criticism of 
life " ; his plea for " high seriousness " as essential 
to a classic; his pleasant substitute for the old 
English word God — "the not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness"; "lucidity of mind"; 
" natural magic " in the poetic treatment of nature j 



194 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

" the grand style '' in poetry ; these phrases of his 
have passed into the literary consciousness and 
carried with them at least a superficial recognition 
of many of his ideas. 

Iteration Arnold uses, too, as a weapon of ridi- 
cule. He isolates some unluckily symbolic phrase 
of his opponent's, points out its damaging implica- 
tions or its absurdity, and then repeats it pitilessly 
as an ironical refrain. The phrase gains in gro- 
tesqueness at each return — ^' sweetening and gath- 
ering sweetness evermore" — and, finally, seems 
to the reader to contain the distilled quintes- 
sence of the foolishness inherent in the view that 
Arnold ridicules. It is in this way that in Culture 
and Anarchy the agitation to "enable a man to 
marry his deceased wife's sister " becomes symbolic 
of all the absurd fads of "liberal practitioners." 
Similarly, when he is criticising the cheap enthu- 
siasm with which democratic politicians describe 
modern life, Arnold culls from the account of a 
Nottingham child-murder the phrase, "Wragg is 
in custody," and adds it decoratively after every 
eulogy on present social conditions. Or, again, 
the Times, at a certain diplomatic crisis, exhorts 
the Government to set forth England's claims 
"with promptitude and energy"; and this gran- 
diloquent, and, under the circumstances, empty 
phrase becomes, as Arnold persistently rings its 
changes, irresistibly droll as symbolic of cheap 
bluster. Whole sentences are often reiterated by 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 195 

Arnold in tliis same satirical fashion. Mr. Pred- 
eric Harrison, in the course of a somewhat atra- 
bilious criticism, had accused Arnold of being a 
mere dilettante and of having " no philosophy with 
coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and deriva- 
tive principles." This latter phrase, with its bris- 
tling array of epithets, struck Arnold as delightfully 
redolent of pedantry; and, as has already been 
noted, it recurs again and again in his writings in 
passages of mock apology and ironical self-depre- 
ciation. Eeaders of Literature arid Sdencej too, 
will remember how amusingly Arnold plays with 
"Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that *our an- 
cestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail 
and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits.' " 
It should be noted that in all these cases the phrase 
that is reiterated has a symbolic quality, and there- 
fore, in addition to its delicious absurdity, comes to 
possess a subtly argumentative value. 

Akin to Arnold's skilful use of reiteration is 
his ingenuity in the invention of telling nicknames. 
On three classes of his fellow-countrymen he has 
bestowed names that have become generally cur- 
rent, — Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. 
The Nonconformist, because of his unyielding sec- 
tarianism, he compares to Ephraim, "a wild ass 
alone by himself." To Professor Huxley, who has 
been talking of "the Levites of culture," Arnold 
suggests that " the poor humanist is sometimes apt 
to regard" men of science as the "Nebuchadnez- 



196 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

zars" of culture. The Church and State Revieio 
Arnold dubs " the High Church rhinoceros " ; the 
Record is "the Evangelical hyena." 

It is interesting to note how often Arnold's satire 
has a biblical turn. His mind is saturated with 
Bible history and his memory stored with biblical 
phraseology; moreover, allusions whether to the 
incidents or the language of the Bible are sure to 
be quickly caught by English readers; hence Ar- 
nold frequently gives point to his style through 
the use of scriptural phrases or illustrations. 
Many of the foregoing nicknames come from bib- 
lical sources. The lectures on Homer offer one 
admirable instance of Scripture quotation. Ar- 
nold has been urged to define the grand style. 
With his customary dislike of abstractions, he 
protests against the demand. "Alas! the grand 
style is the last matter in the world for verbal 
definition to deal with adequately. One may say 
of it as is said of faith : ' One must feel it in order 
to know what it is.' But, as of faith, so too we 
may say of nobleness, of the grand style: *Woe to 
those who know it not! ' yet this expression, 
though indefinable, has a charm ; one is the better 
for considering it; bonum est, nos hie esse; nay, 
one loves to try to explain it, though one knows 
that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, 
who ask the question. What is the grand style? 
with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, 
inadequate as it must be. For those who ask it 



MATTHEW ARNOLD I97 

mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to 
them with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words : 
Moriemini in peccatis vestris. Ye shall die in your 
sins." 

An interesting comment on this habit of Arnold's 
of scriptural phrasing occurs in one of his letters: 
"The Bible," he says, "is the only book well 
enough known to quote as the Greeks quoted 
Homer, sure that the quotation would go home to 
every reader, and it is quite astonishing how a 
Bible sentence clinches and sums up an argument. 
'Where the State's treasure is bestowed,' etc., for 
example, saved me at least half a column of dis- 
quisition." A moment later he adds a charmingly 
characteristic explanation as regards his incidental 
use of Scripture texts: "I put it in the Vulgate 
Latin, as I always do when I am not earnestly 
serious." This habit of "high seriousness" in 
such matters, it is to be feared he in some measure 
outgrew. 

Arnold's fine instinct in the choice of words has 
thus far been illustrated chiefly as subservient to 
satire. In point of fact, however, it is subject to 
no such limitation. Whatever his purpose, he has 
in a high degree the faculty of putting words to- 
gether with a delicate congruity that gives them a 
permanent hold on the memory and imagination. 
In this power of fashioning vital phrases he far 
surpasses Newman, and indeed most recent writers 
except those who have developed epigram and ^ 



198 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

paradox into a meretricious manner. "A free 
play of the mind " ; " disinterestedness " ; "a cur- 
rent of true and fresh, ideas " ; " the note of pro- 
vinciality " ; " sweet reasonableness " ; " the method 
of inwardness " ; " the secret of Jesus " ; " the study 
of perfection " ; " the power of conduct, the power of 
intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and 
the power of social life and manners " — how hap- 
pily vital are all these phrases! How perfectly 
integrated ! Yet they are unelaborate and almost 
obvious. Christianity is "the greatest and happi- 
est stroke ever yet made for human perfection." 
"Burke saturates politics with thought." "Our 
august Constitution sometimes looks ... a colos- 
sal machine for the manufacture of Philistines." 
" English public life . . . that Thyestean banquet 
of claptrap." The Atlantic cable — "that great 
rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking in- 
utilities." These sentences illustrate still further 
Arnold's deftness of phrasing. But with the last 
two or three we return to the ironical manner that 
has already been exemplified. 

In his use of figures Arnold is sparing; similes 
are few, metaphors by no means frequent. It may 
be questioned whether it is ever the case with Ar- 
nold, as with Newman, that a whole paragraph is 
subtly controlled in its phrasing by the presence of 
a single figure in the author's mind. Simpler in this 
respect Arnold's style probably is than even New- 
man's; its general inferiority to Newman's style in 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 199 

point of simplicity is owing to the infelicities of 
tone and manner that have already been noted. 

Illustrations, Arnold uses liberally and happily. 
He excels in drawing them patly from current 
events and the daily prints. This increases both 
the actuality of his discussion — its immediacy — 
and its appearance of casualness, of being a pleas- 
antly unconsidered trifle. For example, the long 
and elaborate discussion, Culture and Anarchy, be- 
gins with an allusion to a recent article in the 
Quarterly Review on Sainte-Beuve. Curiosity as a 
habit of mind had been somewhat disparaged in 
that article, and it is through a colloquial exami- 
nation of just what is involved in commendable 
curiosity that Arnold is led to his analysis of 
culture. Later in the same chapter, references 
occur to such sectarian journals as the Noncon- 
formist, and to current events as reported and crit- 
icised in their columns. Even in essays dealing 
with purely literary topics — in such an essay as 
that on Eugenie de Guerin — there is this same 
actuality. "While I was reading the journal of 
Mile, de Guerin," Arnold tells us, "there came 
into my hands the memoir and poems of a young 
Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham '; and then 
he uses this memoir to illustrate the contrasts 
between the poetic traditions of Eoman Catholi- 
cism and the somewhat sordid intellectual poetry 
of English sectarian life. This closeness of rela- 
tion between Arnold's writing and his daily expe- 



200 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

rience is very noticeable, and increases tlie reader's 
sense of the novelty and genuineness and immediacy 
of what he reads ; it conduces to that impression of 
vitality that is, perhaps, in the last analysis, the 
most characteristic impression the reader carries 
away from Arnold's writings. 

VIII 

And, indeed, the union in Arnold's style of actu- 
ality with distinction becomes a very significant 
matter when we turn to consider his precise rela- 
tion to his age, for it suggests what is perhaps the 
most striking characteristic of his personality — his 
reconciliation of conventionality with fineness of 
spiritual temper. In this reconciliation lies the 
secret of Arnold's relation to his romantic prede- 
cessors and to the men of his own time. He ac- 
cepts the actual, conventional life of the every-day 
world frankly and fully, as the earlier idealists had 
never quite done, and yet he retains a strain of 
other- worldliness inherited from the dreamers of 
former generations. Arnold's gospel of culture is 
an attempt to import into actual life something of 
the fine spiritual fervour of the Komanticists with 
none of the extravagance or the remoteness from 
fact of those "madmen" — those idealists of an 
earlier age. 

Like the Romanticists, Arnold gives to th^ 
imagination and the emotions the », primacy in 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 201 

life; like the Eomanticists he contends against 
formalists, system-makers, and all devotees of 
abstractions. It is by an exquisite tact, rather 
than by logic, that Arnold in all doubtful inatters 
decides between good and evil. He keeps to the 
concrete image ; he is an appreciator of life, not a 
deducer of formulas or a demonstrator. He is con- 
tinually concerned about what ought to be; he is 
not cynically or scientifically content with the 
knowledge of what is. And yet, unlike the Eo- 
manticists, Arnold is in the world, and of it; he 
has given heed to the world-spirit's warning, " sub- 
mit, submit''; he has *' learned the Second Eever- 
ence, for things around." In Arnold, imaginative 
literature returns from its romantic quest for the 
Holy Grail and betakes itself half -humorously, and 
yet with now and then traces of the old fervour, to 
the homely duties of every-day life. 

Arnold had in his youth been under the spell of 
romantic poetry; he had heard the echoes of "the 
puissant hail" of those "former men," whose 
"voices were in all men's ears." Indeed, much 
of his poetry is essentially a beautiful threnody 
over the waning of romance, and in its tenor bears 
witness alike to the thoroughness with which he 
had been imbued with the spirit of the earlier 
idealists and to his inability to rest content with 
their relation to life and their accounts of it. It 
is the unreality of the idealists that dissatisfies 
Arnold, their visionary blindness to fact, their mor- 



202 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

bid distaste for the actual. Much as he delights 
in the poetry of Shelley and Coleridge, these 
qualities in their work seem to him unsound and 
injurious. Or, at other times, it is the capricious 
self-will of the Eomanticists, their impotent iso- 
lation, their enormous egoism, that impress him 
as fatally wrong. Even in Wordsworth he is 
troubled by a semi-untruth and by the lack of a 
courageous acceptance of the conditions of human 
life. Wordsworth's 

" Eyes avert their ken 
From half of human fate." 

Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense 
of the beauty and nobleness of romantic and ideal- 
istic poetry, finely touched as he was into sympa- 
thy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, 
quivering sensibilities, and half-mystical aspira- 
tions that this poetry called into play, he yet came 
to regard its underlying conceptions of life as in- 
adequate and misleading, and to feel the need of 
supplementing them by a surer and saner relation 
to the conventional world of common sense. The 
Eomanticists lamented that " the world is too much 
with us." Arnold shared their dislike of the world 
of dull routine, their fear of the world that enslaves 
to petty cares ; yet he came more and more to dis- 
tinguish between this world and the great world of 
common experience, spread out generously in the 
lives of all men ; more and more clearly he realized 



MATTHEW AKNOLD 203 

that the true land of romance is in this region of 
every-day fact, or else is a mere mirage; that 
"America is here or nowhere." 

Arnold, then, sought to correct the febrile un- 
reality of the idealists by restoring to men a true 
sense of the actual values of life. In this attempt 
he had recourse to Hellenic conceptions with their 
sanity, their firm delight in the tangible and the 
visible, their regard for proportion and symmetry 
— and more particularly to the Hellenism of 
Goethe. Indeed, Goethe may justly be called 
Arnold's master — the writer who had the largest 
share in determining the characteristic principles 
in his theory of life. Goethe's formula for the 
ideal life — /m Ganzen, Guteyi Wahren, resolut zu 
leben — sums up in a phrase the plea for perfection, 
for totality, for wisely balanced self-culture, that 
Arnold makes in so many of his essays and books. 

Allasions to Goethe abound in Arnold's essays, 
and in one of his letters he speaks particularly of 
his close and extended reading of Goethe's works. ^ 
His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in his 
Memorial Verses and Obermann, have given endur- 
ing expression to his admiration for Goethe's 
sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest 
prose appreciation of Goethe occurs in A French 
Critic on Goethe, where he characterizes him as 
" the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker 
of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and 

1 Letters, II, 165. 



204 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest 
modern man."^ It is precisely in this matter 
of the criticism of life that Arnold took Goethe 
for master. Goethe, as Arnold saw, had passed 
through the tempering experiences of Eomanti- 
cism; he had rebelled against the limitations of 
actual life (in Werther, for example, and Goetz), and 
sought passionately for the realization of romantic 
dreams ; and he had finally come to admit the fu- 
tility of rebellion and to recognize the treacherous 
evasiveness of emotional ideals; he had learned 
the "Second Reverence, for things around." He 
had found in self -development, in wise self -disci- 
pline for the good of society, the secret of success- 
ful living. Arnold's gospel of culture is largely a 
translation of Goethe's doctrine into the idiom of 
the later years of the century, and the minute 
adaptation of it to the special needs of English- 
men. There is in Arnold somewhat less sleek 
paganism than in Goethe — a somewhat more genu- 
ine spiritual quality. But the wise limitation of 
the scope of human endeavour to this world is the 
same with both; so, too, is the sane and uncom- 
plaining acceptance of fact and the concentration 
of thought and effort on the pursuit of tangible 
ideals of human perfection. Goethe tempered by 
Wordsworth — this is not an unfair account of the 
derivation of Arnold's ideal. 

From one point of view, then, Arnold may fairly 

1 Mixed Essays, pp. 233-234. 



I 



MATTHEW AENOLD 205 

enough be called the special advocate of conven- 
tionality. He recommends and practises conform- 
ity to the demands of conventional life. He has 
none of the pose or the mannerisms of the seer 
or the bard; he is a frequenter of drawing-rooms 
and a diner-out, and is fairly adept in the dialect 
and mental idiom of the frivolously-minded. In 
all that he writes, " he delivers himself," as the her- 
oine in Peacock's novel urged Scythrop (Shelley) 
to do, "like a man of this world." He pretends 
to no transcendental second sight and indulges 
in none of Carlyle's spinning-dervish jargon. He 
is never guilty of Ruskin's occasional false sen- 
timent or falsetto rhetoric. The world that he 
lives in is the world that exists in the minds and 
thoughts and feelings of the most sensible and 
cultivated people who make up modern society; 
the world over which, as its presiding genius, 
broods the haunting presence of Mr. George Mere- 
dith's Comic Spirit. It is " in this world " that 
"he has hope," in its ever greater refinement, in 
its ever greater comprehensiveness, in its increas- 
ing ability to impose its standards on others. 
When he half pleads for an English Academy — 
he never quite pleads for one — he does this because 
of his desire for some organ by which, in art and 
literature, the collective sense of the best minds in 
society assembled may make itself effective. So, 
too, when he pleads for the Established Church he 
does this for similar reasons ; he is convinced that 



206 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

it offers by far the best means for imposing widely 
upon the nation, as a standard of religious experi- 
ence, what is most spiritual in the lives and aspira- 
tions of the greatest number of cultivated people. 
In many such ways as these, then, Matthew 
Arnold's kingdom is a kingdom of this world. 

And yet, after all, Arnold wears his worldliness 
with a very great difference. If he be compared, 
for example, with other literary men of the world, 
— with Francis Jeffrey or Lord Macaulay or Lock- 
hart, — there is at once obvious in him an all-per- 
vasive quality that marks his temper as far subtler 
and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a world- 
liness of his own, compounded out of many exqui- 
site simples. His faith in poetry is intense and 
absolute. " The future of poetry," he declares, " is 
immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of 
its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will 
find an ever surer and surer stay." This decla- 
ration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay's pes- 
simistic theory of the essentially make-believe 
character of poetry — a theory that puts it on a 
level with children's games, and, like the still 
more puerile theory of Herr Max Nordau, looks 
forward to its extinction as the race reaches genu- 
ine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold 
the most adequate and beautiful mode of speech 
possible to man; and this faith, which runs im- 
plicitly through all his writing, is plainly the out- 
come of a mood very different from that of the 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 207 

ordinary man of the world, and is the expression 
of an emotional refinement and a spiritual sensitive- 
ness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheri- 
tance from the Eomanticists. This faith is the 
manifestation of the ideal element in his nature, 
which, in spite of the plausible man-of-the-world 
aspect and tone of much of his prose, makes itself 
felt even in his prose as the inspirer of a kind of 
"divine unrest." 

In his Preface to his first series of essays 
Arnold playfully takes to himself the name tran- 
scendentalist. To the stricter sect of the transcen- 
dentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He 
certainly has none of their delight in envisag- 
ing mystery; none of their morbid relish for an 
" O altitudo ! " provided only the altitude be 
wrapped in clouds. He believes, to be sure, in 
a " power not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
ness"; but his interest in this power and his com- 
ments upon it confine themselves almost wholly to 
its plain and palpable influence upon human con- 
duct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated 
as more than a transcendentalist manque; and in 
his prose he is never so aware of the unseen as in 
his poetry. 

Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcenden- 
talist, Arnold is, in Disraeli's famous phrase, "on 
the side of the angels " ; he is a persistent and 
ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utili- 
tarian conceptions of life. " The kingdom of God 



208 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

is within you"; this is a cardinal point in the 
doctrine of Culture. The highest good, that for 
which every man should continually be striving, is 
an inner state of perfection; material prosperity, 
political enactments, religious organizations — all 
these things are to be judged solely according to 
their furtherance of the spiritual well-being of the 
individual ; they are all mere machinery — more or 
less ingenious means for giving to every man a 
chance to make the most of his life. The true 
"ideal of human perfection" is "an inward spir- 
itual activity, having for its characters increased 
sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased 
sympathy." Arnold's worldliness, then, is a 
worldliness that holds many of the elements of 
idealism in solution, that has none of the cynical 
acquiescence of unmitigated worldliness, that 
throughout all its range shows the gentle urgency 
of a fine discontent with fact. 
' To realize the subtle and high quality of Ar- 
nold's genius, one has but to compare him with 
men of science or with rationalists pure and sim- 
ple, — with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, 
or Bentham. Their carefulness for truth, their 
intellectual strength, their vast services to man- 
kind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. 
Yet Arnold has a far wider range of sensibilities 
than any one of them; life plays upon him in far 
richer anH more various ways ; it touches him into 
response through associations that have a more dis- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 209 

tinctively liuman characterj and that have a deeper 
and a warmer colour of emotion drawn out of the 
past of the race. In short, Arnold brings to bear 
upon the present a finer spiritual appreciation than 
the mere man of the world or the mere man of sci- 
ence — a larger accumulation of imaginative expe- 
rience. Through this temperamental scope and 
refinement he is able, while accepting conventional 
and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from 
its routine and its commonplace character, and to 
import into it beauty and meaning and good from 
beyond the range of science or positive truth. All 
this comes from the fact that, despite his worldly 
conformity, he has the romantic ferment in his 
blood. If his conformity be compared with that 
of the eighteenth century, — with the worldliness 
of Swift or Addison, — the transformation wrought 
by romantic influences is appreciable in all its scope 
and meaning. 

Finally, Arnold makes of life an art rather than 
a science, and commits the conduct of it to an ex- 
quisite tact, rather than to reason or demonstra- 
tion. The imaginative assimilation of all the best 
experience of the past — this he regards as the 
right training to develop true tact for the discern- 
ment of good and evil in all practical matters, 
where probability must be the guide of life. We 
are at once reminded of Newman's Illative Sense, 
which was also an intuitive faculty for the dex- 
trous apprehension of truth through the aid of 



210 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

tlie feelings and the imagination. But Arnold's 
new Sense comes much nearer than Newman's to 
being a genuinely sublimated Common Sense. Ar- 
nold's own Jlair in matters of art and life was as- 
tonishingly keen, and yet he would have been the 
last to exalt it as unerring. His faith is ultimately 
in the best instincts of the so-called remnant — in 
the collective sense of the most cultivated, most 
delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded 
people of the world. Through the combined intui- 
tions of such men sincerely aiming at perfection, 
truth in all that pertains to the conduct of life will 
be more and more nearly won. Because of this 
faith of his in sublimated worldly wisdom, Arnold, 
unlike Newman, is in sympathy with the Zeitgeist 
of a democratic age. 

And, indeed, here seems to rest Arnold's really 
most permanent claim to gratitude and honour. 
He accepts — with some sadness, it is true, and 
yet genuinely and generously — the modern age, 
with its scientific bias and its worldly preoccupa- 
tions ; humanist as he is, half -romantic lover of an 
elder time, he yet masters his regret over what is 
disappearing and welcomes the present loyally. 
Believing, however, in the continuity of human 
experience, and, above all, in the transcendent 
worth to mankind of its spiritual acquisitions, won 
largely through the past domination of Christian 
ideals, he devotes himself to preserving the quin- 
tessence of this ideal life of former generations and 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 211 

insinuating it into the hearts and imaginations of 
men of a ruder age. He converts himself into 
a patient, courageous mediator between the old 
and the new. Herein he contrasts with Newman 
on the one hand, and with modern devotees of 
aestheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose 
delicately spiritual temperament was subdued even 
more deeply than Arnold's to Eomanticism, shrunk 
before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of 
modern life, and sought to realize his spiritual 
ideals through the aid of mediaeval formulas and a 
return to mediaeval conceptions and standards of 
truth. Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at 
the cost of what some have called the Great Re- 
fusal. A like imperfect synthesis is characteristic 
of the followers of art for art's sake. They, too, 
give up common life as irredeemably crass, as un- 
malleable, irreducible to terms of the ideal. They 
turn for consolation to their own dreams, and 
frame for themselves a House Beautiful, where 
tney may let these dreams have their way, "far 
from the world's noise," and "life's confederate 
plea." Arnold, with a temperament perhaps as 
exacting as either of these other temperaments, 
takes life as it offers itself and does his best with 
it. He sees and feels its crudeness and disorderli- 
ness ; but he has faith in the instincts that civil- 
ized men have developed in common, and finds 
in the working of these instincts the continuous, 
if irregular, realization of the ideal. 



JAN 18 1899 



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